Introduction by Noam Elcott. Text by Sylvia Lavin.
Over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, James Welling (born 1951) photographed the Glass House, the architectural landmark estate that Philip Johnson built in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949. Welling's photos offer a decided departure from the familiar views of the house and grounds: using digital cameras set on a tripod and holding a variety of filters in front of the lens, he created tinted veils and distortions that transformed the image at the moment of exposure, endowing it with powerful swells of glowing color. As Welling described it in an interview with Artforum, the use of filters enabled his project to become "a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity and color." The 45 images presented here, which invite the viewer to draw associations between the camera's lens and the glass surfaces of the house itself, oscillate before our very eyes between photographic abstraction--a recurrent preoccupation for Welling--and depictions of architecture. With this body of work, Welling has located a wholly new approach to, and blend of, both genres.
Featured image is reproduced from James Welling: Glass House.
SYLVIA LAVIN: If the first obvious question to ask of this body of work is why the Glass House, then the second obvious question is why color?
JAMES WELLING: As an artist, I always take the particular skills I’ve developed for the previous project into the next one. When I went to Farnsworth, I was thinking about color from a previous project, Hexachromes (2005). I was very interested in making visible trichromaticity, in demonstrating how we see with red, green, and blue receptors in our eyes. I teach a seminar on color, and I like to emphasize this foundational idea of trichromatic vision. And it’s an intense problem in photography. Very few people make work about it, because it’s built into the nature of the photographic emulsion and it’s nearly impossible to separate it out. So I was working on how to do something where I would see trichromatic filtering in both human vision, and in photographic practice. I made a group of color photographs using multiple exposures as shadows moved across succulent plants to create brilliant color. When I got to the Glass House, it was a spectacular October day, but there was no air movement to give me the moving shadows I used in Hexachromes. I quickly rethought the project and decided to put the multiple colored filters in front of the lens, not sequentially as before, but overlapping.
James Welling, in conversation with Sylvia Lavin, excerpted from Glass House.
The following interview is reproduced from Damiani's stunning new monograph, James Welling: Glass House, which launches Thursday, January 20th at the Hammer museum as part of the UCLA Department of Art Lecture Series. To view event details, please visit the museum's Events page. continue to blog
On Sunday, February 26, David Zwirner Gallery hosted photographer James Welling signing copies of his new book, Glass House, which collects 45 photographs made over the course of three years—from 2006 to 2009—of architect Philip Johnson's 1949 New Canaan, Connecticut, masterwork, the Glass House. Working with a digital camera, tripod and numerous colored lens filters, Welling created tinted veils and distortions that transformed his images at the moment of exposure; the resulting photographs seem to oscillate between crisp architectural detail and the abstracting effects of filtered color. According to a recent piece by Welling in Artforum, the Glass House project was "a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity and color." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 13 x 10 in. / 112 pgs / 45 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9788862081610 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 4/30/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Damiani. Introduction by Noam Elcott. Text by Sylvia Lavin.
Over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, James Welling (born 1951) photographed the Glass House, the architectural landmark estate that Philip Johnson built in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949. Welling's photos offer a decided departure from the familiar views of the house and grounds: using digital cameras set on a tripod and holding a variety of filters in front of the lens, he created tinted veils and distortions that transformed the image at the moment of exposure, endowing it with powerful swells of glowing color. As Welling described it in an interview with Artforum, the use of filters enabled his project to become "a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity and color." The 45 images presented here, which invite the viewer to draw associations between the camera's lens and the glass surfaces of the house itself, oscillate before our very eyes between photographic abstraction--a recurrent preoccupation for Welling--and depictions of architecture. With this body of work, Welling has located a wholly new approach to, and blend of, both genres.
