| Chris Welsby has been making
and exhibiting work since 1969. His films and film/video
installations have been exhibited internationally, at major
galleries such as the Tate and Hayward galleries in London, the
Musée du Louvre and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and
the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. |
| "In my single screen films and
single channel videos the mechanics of film and video interact with
the landscape in such a way that elemental processes—such as changes
in light, the rise and fall of the tide or changes in wind
direction—are given the space and time to participate in the process
of representation. The resulting sequences of images make it
possible to envisage a relationship between technology and nature
based on principles other than exploitation and domination.
"The gallery installations deal with the transformations which
occur when the non-Euclidean space of the landscape is imported into
an architectural space based on the rules of geometry and
perspective. The dimensions of the gallery, the size and scale of
the image, the proportions of the video monitor or projection
screen, the positioning of the monitors or screens, are primary
considerations, and central to the meaning of the work. The
fragmentation of image and sound, which characterizes these
installations, acknowledges the split between culture and nature
but, at the same time, opens up the possibility of a less dualistic
reading.
"Unlike the landscape painters and photographers of the
nineteenth century, I have avoided the objective view point
implicit in panoramic vistas or depictions of homogeneous pictorial
space. I have instead concentrated on 'close up' detail and the more
transient aspects of the landscape, using the flickering, luminous
characteristics of the film and video mediums, and their respective
technologies, to suggest both the beauty and fragility of the
natural world.
"The process of re-presenting the landscape in either the single
screen works or the installations is not seen to be separate from
nature or in any way objective, but is viewed instead, as part of a
more symbiotic model in which technology and nature are both viewed
as inter-related parts of a larger gestalt."
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