Profession: Web Development, Artforum
You may or may not remember my post from Fashion’s Night Out, the one where I mentioned going to a dinner party at Il Buco Alimentari. No? Well, the party was to celebrate a show opening at David Zwirner the next day. So the next day I went to the opening.
Profession: Intern at (Art) Amalgamated
Three artists were shown: Al Taylor, Toba Khedoori, and James Welling. I liked Taylor (I was reminded of Japanese watercolors of tsunamis), and I was very intrigued by Khedoori (the way she paints ropes will make you think about more than just nooses), but James Welling’s work spoke to me in a language I didn’t know I knew.
David Zwirner is a large gallery: a series of smooth, brightly lit rooms filled with beautiful things (including people). And Welling’s work was in one of the larger spaces, yet no amount of room seemed like it was enough. I wanted everybody to clear out so that I could sit in the middle of the floor, communing with his images by myself. I wanted to physically consume them so that I would have them with me all the time. The word “sublime,” in the art history class sense, came to mind. No joke. The colors were dreamy and evocative and rich, and they transformed the concrete objects of everyday life–trees, books, doors–into the stuff of fantasy. There was an image of a car that I can only describe as misty, despite the fact that the word “misty” very rarely (if ever) modifies the word “car.” The colors in it were like the smoke from flares: ethereal blues and greys and oranges and greens.
Profession: Artist
An earlier version of this post contained the following phrase: “And therein lies the the strength of Welling’s work?” I used a question mark because the sentence was a parenthetical. In this version, I’m just going to admit that I have no idea what made Welling’s images resonate so strongly for me. All I know is that when I looked at them, they made me want to create. Full stop.
