David
Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street USA | NEW
YORK | CHELSEA
JULY 10,
2017-AUGUST 04, 2017
David
Zwirner is pleased to present Seascape (2017), a new film by James Welling at
its 519 West 19th Street location. This will be the United States premiere of
the work and the artist's seventh solo presentation at the gallery.
In
Seascape, Welling combines his family's past with the histories of cinema,
photography, and painting. The film is
an homage to the artist's grandfather, William C. Welling, who studied with the
American Impressionist painter Wilson Irvine and corresponded with the seascape
painter Fredrick Waugh (1861-1940). Using the recently introduced Cine-Kodak
Model B 16mm camera, Welling's grandfather shot the black-and-white reversal
footage in the early 1930's in Ogunquit, Maine, at the suggestion of Waugh.
Over the course of two days, he filmed the Atlantic Ocean at Perkins Cove—which
was a celebrated site for seascape painters—capturing images of the rocky
coast, which he subsequently used as a basis for a 22 x 27 inch oil painting.
For Seascape, Welling took digital color samples of his grandfather's painting
and, working with three animators, colorized the original footage using After
Effects and Photoshop. The audio component is a contribution from the artist's
brother, William B. Welling, a musician. The sound, which encompasses a slow,
continuous progression of three chords with Foley effects, uses a 1940
"Gloria" accordion, as well as two drums—a 1826 Eli Brown replica
snare drum made in 1990 with 32 beach pebbles placed on the drum head and a
Remo "Ocean Drum." As a collaborative work between the artist, his
grandfather, and his brother, the film, like Welling's photographic series
"Diary/Landscape" (1977-1986) and "Wyeth" (2010-2015),
extends the artist's interest in incorporating autobiographical elements into
his work.
Heike
Eipeldauer, who co-curated Welling's 2017 survey exhibition, Metamorphosis,
notes on the film, "Seascape's traces of use…generate an effect of
abstraction, exposing the temporal material conditions of the formation of the
doubly translated seascape. This brings to mind that the genesis of
abstraction, from Caspar David Friedrich through the Impressionists to Piet
Mondrian, developed via the genre of the landscape. In Seascape, Welling
arrives at a subjective photographic practice, in the form of film, which once
again becomes manifest in a specific nexus of landscape, abstraction, and
emotion."1
Contact
details
519 West
19th Street , Chelsea - New York, NY, USA 10011
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