James Welling
Monday, 9 November 2009
Work from his oeuvre.
“The various steps involved in the creation of these works are instructive: Welling first arranged and exposed plumbago blossoms on black-and-white sheet-film negatives then printed each one using a different assortment of colored gels. Each work is, then, like the result of a performance in the darkroom, where the admixture of infinitely shaded hues seems to pulse, swell, and bleed around and through the spiky branches—a performance that can be repeated, varied, and completed by each viewer in the act of looking. They are also exuberant displays of analogue technical wizardry that constitute an implicit rebuke to the surfeit of digitally manipulated photography that is less than truthful about its methods and effects.” – Text from The Whitney Biennial via Darius Himes