Tank is excited to announce Viewing Stations, a solo exhibition of new works by Edward Chell, as our ultimate show at The Ladywell Tavern premises. After an industrious and successful two and a half years, Tank will be leaving the space and continuing as an independent curatorial organisation. The private view will celebrate the opening of a great show by Edward Chell, but also the wonderful history of Tank.
Private View & Tank Closing Party: Thurs 10th Nov 2011 6:30-9:30pm
Date: 10/10/2024 – 10/10/2024
Time: 18:30
Edward Chell
Viewing Stations
Private View & Tank Closing Party:
Thurs 10th Nov 2011 6:30-9:30pm
Exhibition 11th-26th November 2011
Tank is excited to announce Viewing Stations, a solo exhibition of new
works by Edward Chell, as our ultimate show at The Ladywell Tavern
premises. After an industrious and successful two and a half years, Tank
will be leaving the space and continuing as an independent curatorial
organisation. Tank will now work closely with artists to create
exhibitions in range locations. The private view will not only celebrate
the opening of a great show by Edward Chell, but also the wonderful
history of Tank within the space over the past few years.
In
this solo exhibition, Edward Chell investigates the landscape and flora
of the motorway verge, exploring ideas about place, time and travel
through oil paintings, customised road signage, digital prints and
painted works on gesso panels.
The Viewing Station, described
by the Rev William Gilpin in his British tour guides of the 1780s, was a
precise location from which tourists could contemplate landscapes that
conformed to the picturesque ideal of beauty. Gilpins guides,
coinciding with the construction of new roads and development of
commerce, fuelled the growth of tourism, encouraging people to visit
areas of Britain previously regarded as wildernesses; non-places, devoid
of aesthetic value.
Viewing Stations reconfigures the idea
of a still place at the roadside from which a view is contemplated.
Todays countryside has been cultivated to the extent that uncontrolled
wilderness only springs up in the margins of our road and rail networks
and the semi-derelict grid plans of industrialised corridors. Chell
draws out the complexities and contradictions involved in our encounters
with contemporary wilderness spaces, developing imaginative links
between the macro-world of signs, travel and commerce and the
micro-landscapes of the Edgeland environments immediately adjacent.
These Edgelands invite a new kind of tourist, new ways of looking and
new forms of visual representation. This project evokes the complex
nature of our responses as we move through and around these fluid
spaces. This is the very landscape we access by car, pollute and litter,
and, through our car window, call a kind of home.
Edward Chell
is represented by Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf. His recent
projects include Gran Tourismo at Little Chef Ings, supported by
Grizedale Arts, and work commissioned by Stour Valley Arts, Kent and The
Swedenborg Society, supported by Arts Council England.
Chell
is co-editing a book about motorway environments In The Company of
Ghosts; the Poetics of the Motorway, to be published by erbacce-press
next spring. Contributors include Iain Sinclair, Clio Barnard, Joe
Moran, Cornford & Cross and Dr Malcolm Andrews. There will be a
launch and reading at The Poetry Library on Londons South Bank.
For images and further details please see http://www.edwardchell.com/
Image: Conium maculatum, Edward Chell, Acrylic on and varnish on gesso, 11 inches x 9 inches, 2011
For gallery details: www.tanklondon.co.uk
