FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


Regen Projects
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430



JAMES WELLING EXHIBITION:
9 December 1994 - 14 January 1995
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11-5
Opening reception on Friday, December 9, 6:00 - 8:00 pm





Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by James Welling. Welling's project, which began in the late 70s, is likely the most singular photographic praxis within the medium to date. As Welling has stated, "The problem with photography is that it attempts to capture the world in single snapshots. What interests me is not so much to document the world, but to begin a discourse about it. For me this work has more to do with painting than with photography as practised up to now." In Welling's upcoming exhibition the large black and white photographs on view will allow for a variety of subjects, more about modes of picture making and the painterly possibilities of photography than documentary modes of address.

Welling's iconoclastic approach to photography has allowed for infinite ramifications of the varied theoretical aspects of picture making as well as the making of surprisingly beautiful images. Abstract topographical landscapes (crumpled aluminum foil), lush landscapes (velvet drapes and Filo pastry dough), and the "Degrades" images (saturated color and light studies) are some of Welling's most beautiful images to date. Sometimes using Modernism and the Industrial Revolution as a point of departure, and coincident with the development of photography, Welling's series from the "Diary of Elizabeth C. Dixon, 1840-41 (1822-72)," the "Architectural Photographs/Buildings," by H. H. Richardson , the "Railroad Photographs," and the "Calais Lace Factories" both explored this history while measuring our current distance from it. As an oeuvre Welling's has proved one of the most prophetic and even subversive vis-a-vis picture making to date. And, as critic David Deitcher wrote in 1992, "The dark retrospectivity in Welling's art is not without its humor, a subtle and unsettling wit that is secreted among the strata of random, often contradictory layers of meaning that accumulate in the work of allegorists."





An opening reception for James Welling will take place on Friday, December 9th from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. For further questions please contact Stuart Regen or Shaun Caley at the gallery (310) 276-5424.