Example E.28. The Emotional Solidarity of Ape and Man (Catching up-the emotions of his human friend). Nadezhda N. Ladygina Coates. Moscow, 1935.
Situation: Sitting with a group of people (a meeting, a cocktail party, a casual conversation, whatever) and one of the people in the group feels really strongly about the topic, seems to know more than the others, or has significant power over the fortunes of the others. You have something important to contribute that might contradict the prevailing wind of discussion, might add a relevant overlooked fact, or might just force the group to consider the merits of an alternative course of action. What determines whether or not you speak your mind?
A sense of uncertainty develops; multiple references unfold gradually over time ensuring that meaning is perpetually evolving and mutating. Welch uses this area of confusion to investigate the complex, shifting and often contradictory relationships between people and their environments and the links between nature, culture and the commodified world.
'A Whole New Ball Game', 2010. Photo by Leigh-Ann Pahapill.
LEE WELCH (IRL/USA) is currently undertaking an MFA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and gained his BFA from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. He has received support from the Arts Council, Culture Ireland and Dublin City Council.
He has recently received the Banff Residency at The Banff Centre, Canada (2010) and his work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, most recently A Whole New Ball Game, Banff Centre (2010); Love Letter To a Surrogate, Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Clifford Irving Show curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2009); MISSING LINK, Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest (2009); Non-knowledge, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2008); Claremorris curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas (2008).
Welch was Founder and Director of FOUR, an exhibition space in Dublin. He has recently formed One Thousand and One Nights a project which appears through a myriad of guises and forms that frame a dialogue that mirrors the complex narrative structure of the literature work of the same name and produces the modest black and white quarterly periodical entitled ANAL.