James Welling
Regen Projects
In his fourth solo show at this gallery, James Welling presented recent works from three ongoing series that all borrow from—tweak, honor, and poke at—photographic traditions: the formal, the documentary, the conceptual, and the diaristic. The “Degradés” series, 1985–, are created by manipulating light in the darkroom to expose chromogenic paper and are thus unique color prints, or abstract color photographs. These atmospheric images call to mind Color Field painting and similarly make strange the divide between abstraction and representation. The compositions exist at once as dry records of