Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
Brandywine River Museum of Art
“Gradients,” a series of nine works placed around the sprawling, picturesque Brandywine Conservancy surrounding the Brandywine River Museum, was subtitled “A Sculptural Installation by James Welling,” although Welling himself has said that the works are really more like “site-specific photos.” This deceptively simple characterization only hints at the complexity (both visual and conceptual) of these large-scale digital prints on metal erected in the landscape. The project was commissioned to accompany “Things Beyond Resemblance,” a show of Welling’s photographs relating to Andrew Wyeth (who died in 2009). For that project, Welling photographed various places in Chadds Ford, including Wyeth’s studio, his childhood home, and the neighboring Kuerner family farm, where Wyeth made many of his best-known pictures. For the “Gradients,” Welling returned to these and other locations and took digital photographs that became the basis for color samples, which he used to produce abstract color gradients made in Photoshop. …see the entire review in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.
