LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects presents an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist James Welling. Choreograph features Welling’s most recent series of inkjet prints that incorporate dance, architecture, and landscape in each image. This marks the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at the gallery.

After seeing the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform in 1970, Welling studied dance briefly at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1971 he stopped dancing to attend the California Institute of the Arts, where he concentrated on photography. Choreograph marks Welling’s return to dance, albeit through photographic imagery.

To create these works Welling photographed over a dozen dance companies in New York, Philadelphia, Ottawa, and Los Angeles. The dance photographs were then merged with photographs of architecture (buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph) and landscape imagery (western Connecticut, southern Florida, and Switzerland) in Photoshop’s fundamental red, green, and blue color channels, which are basic to all color photographs. The resulting electronic files were altered by the artist using Photoshop’s Hue and Saturation layers to create complicated, multi-hued photographs, which were then printed on rag paper using a 10 color Epson Stylus Pro 9900 inkjet printer.

About Choreograph James Welling writes: Since 2005 I have been making photographs by tinkering with trichromatic color. In Choreograph I’m putting different images into the trichromatic red, green and blue color channels of Photoshop to produce some very strange looking pictures. (Normative color photographs place the same image into the color channels.) Each Choreograph is a unique solution to the problem of balancing this strange amalgam of superimposed bodies, buildings and open spaces with the most unexpected color combinations that arise from this way of working.

Writing on Choreograph in Artforum in February 2016, art historian Robert Slifkin notes: Welling has repeatedly found ways to use photography’s vital lexicon to reinterpret – and literally remediate – certain contested artistic operations such as painterly gesture, the associative power of landscape, and the sensuous investigation of color.

For his exhibition at Regen Projects, Welling collaborated on the exhibition design with Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee.

A booklet containing a breakdown of the color channels and a list of each color adjustment layer in Choreograph is available at the front desk.