welke
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Lunenburg
Revisited
January 13, 2006 - February 5, 2006
Wayne Welke has been professionally involved in art and architecture throughout his career of four decades. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he holds Bachelor and Master in Architecture degrees from the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology respectively, and is a registered architect. His focus on art photography took form in the late 1980s in a series of educational explorations that included studies with Sally Mann and with Eugene Richards. Mr. Welke was selected to exhibit in the New England Photographers 2001 show at the Danforth Museum of Art. His photography has been exhibited locally at the Photographic Resource Center in juried exhibitions of members' work in 2001 and 2003, and at the Maine Photographic Workshops, Studio SOTO, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Alumni Gallery at University Lutheran, and Zona. He lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The work represented on these pages brings together two projects - “Self Portrait with Flash” and “Central Artery”. On the surface, they reflect opposite poles of my photographic explorations. The first is a very personal, intuitive, and highly subjective series of images. The second is a series of literal, hard-edged architectonic compositions. The juxtaposition of these contrasting studies opens new possibilities of awareness and understanding going beyond either series by itself and beyond their surface differences.
“Central Artery” is a study of the now-demolished elevated highway structure of that name in Boston, locally also known as the green monster. Once a state-of-the-art highway design, it was the most expensive highway construction in the U.S. when built. Photographed in 2003 and 2004, the series is in part a record of the passing of an urban landmark, albeit seldom appreciated by either its users or neighbors. It is also a celebration of the powerful sculptural form of this structural monument, revealed even in its demise.
The series, “Self Portrait with Flash”, has been a work in progress since 1993. In this work I become both the observer and the observed, while the images are drawn entirely from the intuitive. The photographs are the product of a spontaneous process - they are created on film entirely in-camera using open flash, in a single exposure lasting perhaps one minute. No multiple exposures, montage or computer manipulation is involved.
The overlays of images become suggestions of interaction and meaning, endowed with multiple opportunities for interpretation. The series intersects issues of body image - cultural expectations about representations of the middle-aged male body; conceptions of “normality”, self acceptance, and sexuality - and responds with the insights that accrue to an observer approaching without preconception.
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