James Welling at Jay Gorney - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In 1991 James Welling was invited to devise a photographic throw out having to do with the famous lacemaking industry of Calais, France. "Usines de Dentelle" (Lace Factories), a series of 32 black-and-white photographs, is the flow The prints are all in small formats, ranging from 3 1/2 through 4 1/2 inches to 8 3/4 through 10 inches.

The shoot forward would seem by its true nature somewhat retardataire. Aside from underwear and wedding gown lace is virtually absent from greatest in quantity people's lives today. Welling reinforces this perception of the old-fashioned nature of lace by dint of showing us the Leavers loom a machine for making lace that has been in use for the past 180 years. exclude for the overhead fluorescent lighting that is barely visible in the factory spectacles many of the photographs could have been made in the last hundred The Jacquartronic and Rachel loom that Welling nears in other photographs are plenteous slicker and more contemporary in have feeling and an occasional plastic bottle or other accessory establishes their present-day setting.

Welling's attitude toward his make subordinate is difficult to decipher. This is no paean to the industrial age; the loom are not lovingly photographed to direct the eye like sculpture, as in company pamphlets These machines are anonymous, and we advance away with little sense of their function unles a turn of lace happens to be visible. There is bustle around them, and one doesn't gain the sense that Welling finds them particularly beautiful. still he doesn't seem interested in the flesh-and-blood part of the industry, either. Humans make an appearance in solitary a handful of the photographs, and plane here the figures are slightly blurr or confined to a actual small portion of the picture. When clan are omitted, scale is frequently hard to decipher. Despite the factory illumination, light looks sucked out of these interior sights and the sense of claustrophobia is accentuated by the agency of the small format.

Welling's past works have ironically annotateed on the nature of photography. In the 1980 he exhibited images that at first looked topographic studies but on closer examination turn rounded out to be studio photographs of crumpl bits of aluminum foil. Any irony in this exhibit is of the most deadpan variety, perhaps revolving around the paradox that an item whose true name we associate with delicacy is made in a deadening, mechanical environment.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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