Alumnus Josh Tonsfeldt '07 in Solo Show at Broadway Gallery
Alumnus Josh Tonsfeldt ‘07 was featured in a solo exhibition at Broadway Gallery.
On view from February 25th until March 26th, this show impressed viewers with its breadth. It included wall mounted sculptures, photographs, a single-channel video, and a large-scale installation, demonstrating the artist’s characteristic complexity of medium and application.
“Blending found images and abstraction, technology and raw emotion, Tonsfeldt examines the nexus of nature and culture with an allusive and poetic touch,” said the press release. In the first gallery, the artist installed a sequence of found and fabricated children’s masks that were attached to the ceiling. This portion of the installation was at once playful and disturbing, showing Tonsfeldt’s adept ability to explore emotion.
In fact, each mask wore an expression from the Wong-Baker Scale “(used by pediatricians to determine intensity of pain in their patients and, more recently, for customer satisfaction surveys) from a broad smile to an anguished grimace.” By evoking these commonplace images, Tonsfeldt tied his work to scientific discovery, contemporary capitalism, and our current age of anxiety.
Other artforms in the space included a series of photographs printed on thin slabs of fiberglass-reinforced plaster. By “depicting other glancing indices of childhood—a bookbag, a globe, a trip to Legoland—we begin to construct a narrative that interlaces Tonsfeldt’s studio practice, the isolation of the past two years, and his private life as a father.”
Finally, there was a video installation that evoked the precarity of the domestic space. That which seemed abstract at first, one soon realized was a closeup shot of an animal’s fur, slowly moving alongside the sound of labored breathing.
Tonsfeldt has exhibited widely from solo shows at Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York, NY, VidalCuglietta in Brussels, Belgium, and Rowhouse Project in Baltimore, MD among others. His group shows include 100 Sculptures at Anonymous Gallery in New York City, I Was Raised on the Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Il Paesaggio di Paradiso at Le Scalze in Naples. He earned his BA at Purchase College, and his MFA from Columbia University.
