Exhibition — Witnesses: James Welling/Chris Welsby

University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present Witnesses: James Welling / Chris Welsby. The exhibition will be on view March 1 through March 31, 2024. All events are free and open to the public.

Witnesses comprises recent work by two artists, the photographer James Welling and the filmmaker Chris Welsby. Throughout the exhibition, images of the natural world and of human constructions abandoned within it have been processed or manipulated in ways that disturb a viewer’s simple delight in what is being represented. Botanical studies, landscapes, and views of weed-eaten structures are corrupted in these artworks by slight but consuming indications of each artist’s method. Borrowing its title from a quote of Friedrich Schiller’s, the exhibition deals with the modern problem of a lost oneness with nature, and with the difficulties inherent in trying to regain it.

Schiller wrote in 1795 that artists and “poets are everywhere the guardians of nature.” But where, as in modern life, they “can no longer completely be this, and where they have already experienced within themselves the destructive influence of arbitrary and artificial forms, they will appear as nature’s witnesses.” This exhibition’s 15 works demonstrate how, given our troubled contemporary relationship with it, abstracting nature can be a perverse but necessary means of witnessing nature most ethically.

Welling and Welsby began their respective careers in the early 1970s, the one in California, the other in London. Welling was trained at the California Institute of the Arts at a time when many young artists were beginning to metabolize the lessons of conceptual art from the previous decade and to integrate them with other, less wholly cerebral approaches to artmaking. Welsby, a member from 1972 of the influential London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, developed as a young artist in the milieu of Structural/Materialist Film, an avant-garde movement that emphasized the reliance of any moving image’s meaning upon the physical stuff with which it was made and presented.

For each artist, a sensitivity for the productive tension between a pure artistic idea and the necessity of transmitting and transmuting it through some medium has been, for decades, predominant in his work. Witnesses shows that the different ways Welling and Welsby emphasize the processes of depiction in their work can be considered at once to effect and to countervail a lost authenticity in humans’ relationship with the natural world.

Witnesses: James Welling / Chris Welsby is organized by Troy Sherman, Curator at University Galleries. This exhibition and programming are supported by University Galleries’ grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.