Viewing Stations

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 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. Gilpin’s 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. Today’s 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.

Tank Gallery