James Welling
#17 Pink
James Welling’s #17 Pink is a photogram—a photographic image produced without the use of a camera. Here, the artist placed plumbago blossoms on a sheet of eight-by-ten-inch film and exposed it to light. The negative was then projected onto Kodak Metallic Endura paper through a color mural enlarger and cooler filters to produce the multicolored print. Similar techniques were used to produce Stowe (2006), an ambiguous work that refers to the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Folded and curled, the fabric reveals an obdurate materiality through the density and thickness of the color and the texture. Welling’s unique processes continuously challenge the criteria and reception of abstract photography.
James Welling has a long-standing interest in pushing the technical and conceptual boundaries of photography. His practice takes photographic norms or the representational field itself as its subject and, through material or digital manipulations, Welling investigates abstraction, turning everyday space or mundane objects into something uncanny but poetic.