James Welling
Donald Young Gallery
“I picked up this wonderful word, ‘ventriloquism,’ and when I discovered photography, I realized that it was the perfect ventriloquist’s medium,” James Welling said in a 2003 interview with critic Jan Tumlir. “I could throw my voice into different sorts of pictures: I could speak in many different formal languages.” After thirty years, however, even a practice predicated on difference can yield tautologies. Not so for Welling; he has remained diligently attentive to the structural variations possible within his medium, moving with admirable fluidity from one innovative investigation to the next.