ART CITIES: N.York- James Welling

James Welling has been questioning the norms of representation since the ‘70s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. Welling is also intensely interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory in his work.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwimer Gallery Archive

James Welling for his solo exhibition “Choreograph” debuts a series of digital photographs of dance, with elements of architecture and/or landscape. Welling’s interest in dance dates back to 1970 when he saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform while at university in Pittsburgh. He took dance classes at the time, but after transferring to the California Institute of the Arts, he turned to photography as his medium. This exhibition marks his return to dance, albeit in photographic form. In an artist’s statement for this series of works Welling notes: “To my surprise the buildings and landscapes that I used often seem to function like theatrical stages for the dancers. The open fields I photographed also suggest a kind of ‘chora’, Greek for space and the root of choreograph. By choosing to use ‘choreograph’, drawing with space, as a noun, I am noting its similarity to ‘photograph’, drawing with light”. For “Choreograph”, Welling photographed performances in New York and Los Angeles, and superimposed these images with photographs of architecture and landscape. Architecture has been a long-standing interest of the artist. For this series he photographed buildings by Marcel Breuer and Paul Rudolph, among others. The landscapes include a large open field in western Connecticut that Welling visited as a dance student, and locations in Florida, Maine, Switzerland, and Washington. The works were made by placing three different black-and-white photographs into Adobe Photoshop’s red, green, and blue color channels, thus yielding a multilayered color image similar to double exposures in analog photography. The artist then alters it using Photoshop tools (hue/saturation and selective color), and as adjustments are made, various parts of the image come forward or recede.

Info: David Zwimer Gallery, 519 West & 19th Street, New York, Duration: 18/11/15-30/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com