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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

James Welling: Seaspace

July 2–5, 2020
1219 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97205, United States

In the 1930s, William C. Welling took a Cine-Kodak Model B 16mm camera to Perkins Cove at Ogunquit Beach, Maine, and filmed the rocky shoreline in black and white. His grandson, the photographer and artist James Welling, retrieved the original film and used contemporary technology to colorize it. The result—Seaspace—is a breathtaking sequence that allows us to re-see the shoreline through the prism of 20th-century painting and contemporary art. Water crashes against red rocks, and white froth explodes from the Atlantic. —E.C.