James WellingMetamorph
Exhibition
LOGIN
Grünangergasse 1
1010 Vienna
8 May – 17 Jun 2017
“Metamorph (Yellow),” 2017 is composed of 120, one half second images culled from my series of dance photographs titled “Choreograph.” The images are drawn from the many variations and outtakes I made while creating “Choreograph” between 2014 and 2017. Each of the photographs was created by entering a black and white image into one of the three red, green or blue color channels of a Photoshop document which I then altered with color adjustment software. I invited my brother Will Welling to create a soundtrack for the film, and his notes follow.”
“Metamorph” is a very compact melody. It was inspired by viewing the black and white, banded, metamorphic rocks on Route 8 north of Waterbury Connecticut, USA. Metamorphic rocks such as those are extremely compact from having been formed and contorted deep within the earth. When exposed in a road cut, they are magnificent-- a profound beauty of the earth. On this recording “Metamorph” is being played at a tempo of 120 beats per minute. The typical, resting human heartbeat is 60 beats per minute. Every second beat of “Metamorph's” tempo is occurring at 60 beats per minute. Even though the tempo is brisk, since it's a multiple of the heart rate, it's relaxing to listen to.”
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Internationally, James Welling is one of the most keenly experimental photographers who has created a most diverse series of works. Fascinated by aesthetic, conceptual and material challenges of the medium he works with black and white photography, photograms, colour photography, handmade filters, and he was an early embracer of digital photography and through this explores the colour potential of Photoshop and ink-jet printing. Welling originally studied painting, and motivated by Merce Cunningham's Dance Company, modern dance for a year in Pittsburgh. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and initially produced sculptures, videos and paintings before concentrating on photography. In the Choreograph series, which the video displayed in LOGIN is based on, these performative and painterly beginnings, along with questions concerning sculpture and the body in space can be seen overlapping with Welling's photographic experiences in MoMA New York's sculpture garden, and his photographs of architecture by Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson and others. “Taking black-and-white photographs of landscapes, dance performances, and architecture, shot himself or by his assistants, he transformed them in Photoshop's red, green, and blue color channels before uniting them in unexpected amalgams. (…) Welling now took the photographic option of merging layers of time to a new level with the technical integration of images he or his assistants had collected with their cameras or mobile phones. In addition to this, he produced further material visiting some dozen dance companies in Los Angeles, Ottawa, and New York. This collage of various fields of interest and influence allows Welling to once again open up new channels, reactivating fields he had already touched upon, such as architecture and landscape, as they encounter the, for him, hitherto photographically unexplored territory of dance. (…) Persistently layering and cross-fading his own personal history, Welling's work manifests itself as a structurally open and dynamic archive about photography, as a medium with parameters similar to human memory that continually reformulates the presence it touches upon. Welling invites us into the gaping vacuum between painting and photography, and he allows us to explore the space between the subject and the image, as well as the space between the self and the other.” (Heike Eipeldauer) Our exhibition in the LOGIN, his 5th solo presentation in the gallery, accompanies James Welling's extensive body of work on show at Kunstforum Wien, Vienna from May 5 – July 16, 2017. The quotes are taken from the exhibition catalogue pages 117 and 123.
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