hanwDESMA9: Event 1 | Hammer Museum

Event 1 | Hammer Museum | James Welling

James Welling’s exhibition is represented by Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. James Welling is a post modern artist born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut, and creates art pieces through realism, transparency, description, personal, cultural memory and material nature. James started his career around 1980’s, and is still participating in art creations.

“Drapes” series is one of the earliest works done by James Welling, which is focusing fabric. Blank paper is shred into desired shapes and placed on a piece of velvet fabric, and James photographed the fabric with paper in different allocations and shapes. Another early series of works is the “Degrades” Series, which depicts graded color backgrounds for different TV decor and product photo during that age. One of the work is called ZEPES, which is created in 1986 on chromogenic print and the work depicted the color of dark read and orange. This very piece of art, along with others in the series enlightened me to the topic of two cultures. During that age, television is one of the most popular and welcome medium. TV ads, as the most interacting and combined arts, are intensively played on television. And the artist on the other hand used other robotics, such as camera, recorded the stereo type of the special display of art.

James Welling’s recent art works including “Flowers” series, created from 2004 to 2011, also has the idea of robotics with art embed. Pressed flowers are placed on 8*10 inches black and white film, the photographed is taken, and different colors are added to the original photo through shaped color films layer by layer. All the techniques applied strengthened the idea that art could be well displayed by robotics, and robotics is not only used for robotic copying. Generally speaking, James Welling’s exhibition is abstract but meaningful, and it could provided people with more direct feelings about how robotics could be applied to actually create arts that could not be done through ordinary ways.