Niagara Falls Project - 1975

Variable size

Video, film and sculpture installation
Exhibited at Steffanoty Gallery, New York 1975
Akademie der Kunste, Berlin 1976
Video Art, Museo Carillo Gil, Mexico City 1977
Ohio University Athens Video Festival 1982
Pratt Institute Fine Arts Gallery 2006

1974-1975

Review(s) on Niagara Falls Project, 1975

Welch never upstages his subjects and doesn't exploit them to make himself appear clever. Instead, he displays a lively, keenly felt concern for what makes other people tick. Welch's most memorable and chilling achievement is the presentation of the "near death" experience of Roger Woodward, who, as a seven-year-old child in 1960, survived a tumble over Niagara Falls.
David Bourdon, The Village Voice, April 26, 1976

The most striking element of the show was the wide-screen film (shot in Panavision), nearly filling the viewer’s field of vision and inducing a vivid, almost vertigo-producing illusion of motion, reminiscent of the roller-coaster sequence in This Is Cinerama. On another level, the inference that this image of the river represents an agency of fate recalls the transcendental view of nature that informed much 19th century American landscape painting. Taken by itself, it is a fairly stunning work of landscape art.
Ross Skoggard, Artforum, 1975

Welch actively seeks the concepts he desires to work with and compiles the information to produce an environmental structure which exists, not as a static entity, but as one that evolves within itself and continues to develop within the viewer. Welch selectively retells and recreates an incident with a method that is both intensely personal and objectively direct… By opening and disposing with the physical sculptural package, Welch presents us with the interior information to assemble in whatever systems we want to.
Philip Smith, “Roger Welch and the Sculpture of Memory”, Arts Magazine, Oct. 1975