WELCH ROGER

WESTFIELD, NEW JERSEY. [1946]

Beginning in 2003, Welch produced a series of sculptures, watercolors such as Yankee Stadium in Meteor Crater, and videos juxtaposing landscapes or combining geologic formations with contemporary man-made structures. For the HD video Laguna Sagaponack, Welch shot Laguna Beach on the Pacific Ocean and Sagaponack, Long Island on the Atlantic. At each location, Welch mounted a camera in a pre-determined position before dawn then shot selectively throughout the day and into the night. The real-time video is edited from several hours to a few minutes presenting the illusion of natural time. The two places were combined in a soft-split screen to appear as a continuous panoramic landscape. For the exhibition Domicile in 2006, French art critic Pierre Tillet wrote: Welch deals with the visual and emotional closeness of distant spaces.

 

The video Hudson River was exhibited at the Kinz Tillou Feigen Gallery, New York in 2008. Two Coasts was exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, France in 2006 together with watercolors and studies for future video projects. The Ground Under My Studio, a watercolor, was included in the Watercolor Worlds exhibition at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, New York in 2004. The O. J. Simpson Project will be exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts in 2012. Backyard, a four channel video and sculpture installation is a work in progress scheduled for completion in 2012.