James Welling. Glass House

0194 (Glass House series). 2006
digital inkjet print. 36,8 x 49,5 cm ; 14.5 x 19.5″


0696 (Glass House series) .2006
digital inkjet print . 85,5 x 128,3 cm ; 33.66 x 50.5″

0462 (Glass House series). 2009
digital inkjet print. 85,5 x 128,3 cm ; 33.66 x 50.5″

0769 (Glass House series). 2006
digital inkjet print. 85,5 x 128,3 cm ; 33.66 x 50.5″


0469 (Glass House series). 2009
digital inkjet print. 85,5 x 128,3 cm ; 33.66 x 50.5″

The Glass House series by JAMES WELLING consists of photographs documenting PHILIP JOHNSON’s iconic Glass House, built in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut. Taken over the course of three years (2006–2009), these photographs were made using a digital camera, and the resulting images capture the architectural features of JOHNSON’s 47-acre compound. To achieve his luminous effects, the artist placed a variety of colored filters between lens and subject to introduce intense fields of color, transforming the image at the moment of exposure.

Although the Glass House is symmetrical (the front is the same as the back), I prefer a frontal view because you can see through the house to the landscape directly west. This is the aspect of the house that is perhaps most fascinating to me. This big glass box, plunked down in the Connecticut landscape, seems like a conceptual sculpture, a gigantic lens in the landscape. When I realized I could make the glass red or add reflections to the face of this supposedly transparent house, my project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color.

JAMES WELLING works in the intersection of photography and photographic technology. Originally associated with The Pictures Generation in the early 1980’s in New York, Welling worked and exhibited extensively in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1995, he joined the Department of Art at University of California Los Angeles.




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