Glass House, a photo series by James Welling on-view at the David Zwirner gallery in New York, consists of sixteen large-scale framed prints and six smaller framed prints.
Each of the prints depicts either the Modernist “Glass House” residence designed by Philip Johnson in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut or further architectural and sculptural elements located on the forty-seven acres of the House’s grounds.
In each digitally-captured image on view through the gallery’s white-walled rooms, the artist experiments with a wide range of lens filtration techniques, resulting in lushly-saturated colors grading over the figure of a giant glass cube (or similarly Modernist iconography) in the midst of the pastoral Connecticut landscape.
Despite the presence of varying seasons and light conditions portrayed throughout the photographs, though, the project as a whole projects a feeling of day-dreamy late-afternoon melancholy and reads in dialog with certain late 1960s psychedelic album covers or the lens flare effects favored by certain European cinematographers of the same era.
Digging a bit deeper into the work, though, one begins to view the significance of these images beyond their somewhat nostalgic sensual power.
First of all, the key technical variable is the variation of filters between the artist’s camera lens and his subject matter.
As one views through the twenty-two photographs on-display here, one begins to view their filters and their filtering (as they are the primary agent of change between the individual photographs in the series) as much as one views their subject matter (the Glass House).
The decision to photograph this particular building is decisive as it illuminates a framework around which to view the process of filtering.
In a project picturing various filtrations on the landscape, the “transparent” glass of the Glass House becomes visible as just one more of these filters – one more obstruction between one’s self and “reality.”
This becomes more intriguing when one considers that the Glass House, in particular – as an idealized model of Modernist ideology – sought to provide a neutral, objective, totally transparent space through which one could look out onto the world.
However, as history has demonstrated, the Modernist vision of objective transparency is hardly without a point of view; it is, indeed, a wildly distinct lens through which to filter one’s view on reality – no better nor worse than any of the varieties of filters employed by Welling through the series (which is fine [it’s not as though there’s something that would be more objective]).
Finally, with all of this in mind, the work offers one more (unintended) kick.
Moving through the gallery space, one views the photographs – yes; but one also views the glare of the glass filter between themselves – as viewers – and the photographic print:
A “neutral, objective, totally transparent” window reflecting back one’s own contextualization in the “neutral, objective, totally transparent” space of the white cube in which all of this is occurring.