Beyond the Sublime - Chris Welsby

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. www.colab.org.nz

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.