Glass House - new work by James Welling on show at the Maureen Paley Gallery, London until 22 May

Maureen Paley presents the second solo exhibition by artist James Welling. The exhibition showcases motifs of the glass house that was built in 1949 in new Canaan, Connecticut. The house was constructed by controversial homosexual American architect and architectural critic Philip Johnson, who passed away in 2005.

James documented the awe-inspiring building with his digital camera over the course of three years. Apart from the glass house, he also photographed the guest house from ‘49, the Lake Pavilion from ‘62 as well as the Lincoln Kirstein sculpture from ‘85, all on the same grounds. Needless to say, he used several different filters to create the effects in the series.

James on his modus operandi: "I’ve been using the word “filter” as a noun but it’s also a verb. A filter lets some wavelengths of light through and certain kinds of information to seep in. In addition to plastic, coloured filters, I introduced clear glass, clear plastic, fogged plastic, pieces of glass that were slightly uneven and tinted, and finally a diffraction filter that breaks light into the spectrum.

Although the Glass House is symmetrical (the front is the same as the back), I prefer a frontal view because you can see through the house to the landscape directly west. This is the aspect of the house that is perhaps most fascinating to me.

This big glass box, plunked down in the Connecticut landscape, seems like a conceptual sculpture, a gigantic lens in the landscape. When I realised I could make the glass red or add reflections to the face of this supposedly transparent house, my project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and colour."

James Welling (b. 1951, Hartford, Connecticut) received his BFA and MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. His popularity has steadily increased since the 1970s and he has been the Head of the Photography at the UCLA Department of Art since 1995.

‘Glass House’ was part of the After Architects group exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2010. The accompanying book was published by Damiani and is available from most good book shops.


Glass House - James Welling
until 22nd of May 2011