James Welling: Flowers

James Welling: Flowers by Bratton, Denise. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780976913689.

This concise and beautiful exhibition catalogue features arresting, colorful, Rorschach Test-like photograms of flowers by the esteemed Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, James Welling. For this series, Welling placed the blossoms of a common southern California plant on sheets of 8x10 film and exposed them to light. The negatives were then projected onto special photo paper through a color mural enlarger and color filters, to produce the dramatic, spectral, almost sun- or moon-dappled images reproduced here. Currently a professor of fine art at UCLA, Welling studied at CalArts in the early 1970s. Welling was the subject of a midcareer retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2000, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented in New York by David Zwirner Gallery and in Los Angeles by Regen Projects.