"8634"

pigment-based inkjet print on Dibond

signed and numbered (ink) on verso

In 1971, I studied modern dance for a year. In 2014, I returned to dance, photographing UCLA under graduate art students in a variety of dance poses. With these photographs, I layered architecture and landscape imagery into the red, green, and blue color channels of Photoshop. In 2015, I began to photograph professional dance companies.
(James Welling)

Three cultural spheres are also the point of departure for the Choreograph series (2014–2017). Until now, his early work has primarily been read with a view to his course of studies in Baldessari's class. However, Welling also spent a year studying modern dance in Pittsburgh, inspired by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; he began to discuss these hidden parts of his biography at the time he was working on Choreograph. Taking black-and-white photographs of landscapes, dance performances, and architecture, shot himself or by his assistants, he transformed them in Photoshop's red, green, and blue color channels before uniting them in unexpected amalgams.
In an approach related to the combining of style and theme in Diary/Landscape, Welling now took the photographic option of merging layers of time to a new level with the technical integration of images he or his assistants had collected with their cameras or mobile phones. In addition to this, he produced further material visiting some dozen dance companies in Los Angeles, Ottawa, and New York. This collage of various fields of interest and influence allows Welling to once again open up new channels, reactivating fields he had already touched upon, such as architecture and landscape, as they encounter the, for him,
hitherto photographically unexplored territory of dance.
(from Martin Germann, "About Touch. James Welling's Art", in: Heike Eipeldauer, Martin Germann (eds.), James Welling: Metamorphosis, Prestel Munich/London/New York 2014, p. 117)