ARTIST TALK: CHRIS WELSBY

Location WA220, AUT, 6pm

BEYOND THE SUBLIME: THE FILMS, VIDEOS AND GALLERY   INSTALLATIONS OF CHRIS WELSBY-

Artist’s Talk with film clips and photo documentation.

Chris Welsby is the new artist in residence at AUT University’s CoLab Creative Technology Centre and is currently preparing work for a solo exhibition opening at the MIC | Toi Rerehiko Arts Centre on Friday 30th October.

Based in Canada, Chris Welsby is an artist and educator and his work is concerned with technology and the landscape. His films and film/video installations have been exhibited internationally and at major galleries. For more info see his website and his profile on Green museum.

Welsby uses the mechanics of the moving image to interact with his environment. The resulting films, expanded cinema works and installations explore notions of interconnectedness and agency within our ever-changing environment. Welsby's films have screened consistently in Cinematheques and avant garde cinemas around the world since 1969. A pioneer of moving images in the gallery, Welsby’s expanded cinema works and installations from the '70s and '80s are now gaining renewed attention by public and private galleries in Europe, North America and Asia.

Welsby was a founding member of the London Filmmakers Co-op and co-founder of the New Media Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London. Currently, he is a professor of Film and Video at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and participates in the University of British Columbia's Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems (ICICS), an interdisciplinary research institute fostering a human-centred paradigm shift in emerging information technologies. Though primarily a science based research program, there are a number of interdisciplinary art and science research projects in progress.

Welsby began making landscape films and installations in the early 70s, and although he has worked across a range of media he has always concentrated on one particular theme: how do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world and how should we position our selves and our technologies within it? His art practice was heavily influenced by Structural Materialist film theory at the London Film Makers Co-operative and by cybernetic and systems theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, where as a graduate and faculty member, he came into contact with some of the pioneers of interactive technology and computer-driven art forms.

Peter Wollen has argued that, “Welsby’s work makes it possible to envisage a relationship between science and art, in which observation is separated from surveillance and technology from domination.” 

According to writer, Fred Camper, Welsby’s work, “...rejects the long tradition of landscape painting (and much subsequent landscape filmmaking) in which images serve as metaphors for the artist’s emotions.”  Instead of observing nature as a Romantic “other”, Welsby uses the mechanics of the moving image to interact with his environment. The resulting films, expanded cinema works and installations explore notions of interconnectedness and agency within our ever-changing environment.

Welsby’s films have screened consistently in Cinematheques and art galleries around the world since 1972. A pioneer of moving images in the gallery, his expanded cinema works and installations from the ‘70s and ‘80s are now gaining renewed attention by public and private galleries in Europe, North America and Asia. “Twenty-five years ago, when he made his first projections for large spaces, film and art rarely met in the gallery; now it is common and installation art is a distinct practice.” – A.L. Rees, Author of A History of Experimental Film and Video.

Since 1993, Welsby has been making digital media installations. These were featured in his 2005 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Winnipeg Canada, and his 2007 solo exhibition at the Letherby Gallery, London UK. His recent new media collaborations with Brady Marks have been well received in Toronto, at the 2006 Images Festival, and in South Korea at the 2006 Gwangju Bienniale South Korea and recently at the Surrey Arts Gallery BC. Canada.

Welsby is currently working on a series of three web cam projects, inspired in part by the ‘world’s first photograph’ taken by Joseph Niépce in 1826 near Chalon-sur-Saône sine.  The image was the result of an 8-hour exposure and as such represents time on a scale that is commensurate with the larger time scale of the passing days and seasons.  

The projects all use custom software to relay tiny fragments of imagery over very extended periods of time. Taking Time, a seascape and public art work for the island of Gabriola, was also exhibited on line from August to December (2008), Time After has been commissioned as part of a solo exhibition at MIC Gallery Auckland New Zealand in 2009 and the Doomsday Clock Project is a proposal to make a one hundred year photographic image of the City of Vancouver.

Welsby has just completed a scholarly essay based on his presentation at the Tate Modern’s symposium on Expanded Cinema (April 2009). The paper is entitled Expanded Cinema: 20th Century Encounters with the Machine and is to be published in a forthcoming book based on the symposium.

Welsby is a graduate of the Experimental Media Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London UK. He is currently Professor of Film and Digital Media at Simon Fraser University Vancouver and a member of ICICS (Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada.

For more info www.colab.org.nz