Elisabeth Tonnard

My work will be on view in the exhibition In Peril on the Sea: Sailing Ships, Stormy Seas, curated by Clive Phillpot at CHELSEA space in London. The exhibition runs from 28 January 2015 to 20 March 2015, with a private view on 27 January, 18:00–20.30.

From the press release:
Taking an excerpt from the text written for the booklet, A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, “It is up to the attentive reader to find out what devilish motive inspired this book’s publication” as a provocation, the exhibition sets out to question and explore ‘motive’ and ‘decoy’ within artistic and curatorial practice.

Both a film and book, A Voyage on the North Sea were distributed together as part of the same package. Thematically connected, the works mutually consisted of 19th and 20th century nautical images including photographic reproductions of an amateur ‘grand master’ painting along with a photograph of a contemporary sailboat. This work, along with many of Broodthaers’ written, object-based and site-specific environments were not widely known in his lifetime – but this work has latterly been canonised within the sphere of contemporary art, not least in part by attention of the renowned US critic Rosalind Krauss in such works as A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (2000).

Looking at artists who, like Broodthaers, approach art production from a post-medium perspective, the exhibition will display works from Lawrence Weiner and Ed Ruscha that contemplate the mysterious and somewhat perilous nature of making and showing art – by being, manifestly, ‘at sea’. Reproductions of nautical works by Willem van de Velde the Younger, Peter Monamy and J.M.W. Turner, unobtainable in their original formats, will be presented via forms of secondary documentation, endlessly accessible and reproducible via printed or digital means.

Book works by Helen Douglas and Elisabeth Tonnard as well as other works from the Special Collections at Chelsea will be on display alongside ephemera and other items.

Tonight is the opening for ‘Reading Room’, at the Owens Art Gallery. The exhibition presents artists’ books and book-like objects by Canadian and international artists. Through intervention, alteration and re-presentation the artists in the exhibition draw attention to how we read, understand, and interact with books. The exhibition includes works by Kristen Atkins, Amelia Bird, Adam David Brown, Michael Dumontier, Lucy Harrison, Emmanuelle Jacques, Micah Lexier, Heidi Neilson, Dave Dyment and Roula Partheniou, Karen Reimer, and Elisabeth Tonnard.

Curated by Kirsty Bell and Lucy MacDonald and produced with the support of the Canada Council of the Arts. The show runs until February 8.