James Welling
These works eschew both the idea of the photograph as a window onto reality and the modernist foregrounding of materials. In fact Welling’s blacks are so flat they seem to merge with the paper. Looking closely, one sees that the diagonal edges of the black bands are composed of very fine sawtooth patterns, a sign that at some stage this was a digital image made up of square pixels.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In a 1998 catalog essay Ulrich Loock wrote, “One might argue that the search for equivocal images has been a driving force in all [Welling’s] output so far.” Even when the works are not abstract–as in Sun or the 18 new digital prints of Polaroids made in 1975 and 1976, also on view–something intervenes to distance the viewer from the subject. Of course digitization removes one from the original objects in the Polaroids: the colors seem at once more precise and less thick. But Welling’s compositions are also apparently intended to obscure rather than illuminate the subject, his first residence and its environs. In Watercolor Palette severe underexposure mutes the contrast between a paint-splattered tray and a bright wall. Studio Corner With Coat, TV Etc. shows the top edge of a TV from behind, a corner where walls meet ceiling, and a dark coat hanging on the left. It’s difficult to pick out the eponymous subject in the underexposed Restaurant Sink, sitting in darkness near the bottom of the image; among the picture’s “highlights” are a few pots and pans and a dark doorway. Orange Window, showing a daylit window whose blinds are shut, is once again about a barrier to seeing.
