The veteran photographer James Welling has long used architecture as a source of inspiration, beginning with images of Los Angeles, in the late seventies, and continuing through his pictures of Philip Johnson’s Glass House and the Maison de Verre, in Paris, in 2009. In Welling’s most recent series, “Choreograph,” which goes on view at the David Zwirner gallery on November 18th, the artist combines images of buildings and interior spaces with snippets of landscape and, grounding the pictures, dancers in rehearsal. (Welling studied dance and performance when he was younger.) Three separate photographs are used for each work; the images are run through different color channels in Photoshop, then layered. The results are lush, beautiful evocations of the part of the dance-making endeavor that few people outside of it see. Dancers in rehearsal listen, they think, they try to see the dance. Welling captures such moments, in various stages—some dancers are standing in the studio in sweat clothes and kneepads, having been stopped in their repetitions, while others are perhaps farther along in the creative process, in costume, caught in the middle of a phrase. In a dance rehearsal, structure—of the choreography, of bodies, of an unadorned space—is exposed, and, early on, a dance’s landscape sprawls. Time can seem to pass very slowly, if inspiration is stingy in arriving and solutions to movement problems are scarce. But, when the pieces fall into place, and a lift is successful or a juxtaposition pleasing, or a desired emotional effect begins to emerge, the rehearsal room can feel flooded with color and possibility. The embrace on a floor can feel like a rose-tinted world of entwining branches, and the space enveloping the dancers is not inhibiting but sheltering. Teased out of the photographs, Welling’s sources are static, but, spliced together, they coalesce into pulsating abstract compositions that transcend building, nature, and dancer.
James Welling’s “Choreograph” opens at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea on November 18th.
