Tonsfeldt’s photographs, videos, sculptures and collection of found objects are often worked into larger sculptures and installations, responding to the site of their display. On this occasion, he has taken into account The Douglas Hyde’s location on a university campus, the gallery space itself and its processes of production to create an installation which presents a new video work in the gallery’s workshop as well as a series of ongoing sculptural works reconfigured across the intimate space of the gallery.

Josh Tonsfeldt’s practice is rooted in everyday life and the accumulation of small gestures that build larger narratives. Attuned to particular media and the way they shape vision and perception, his interdisciplinary works have an intimate and happenstance quality. Across his practice, Tonsfeldt is interested in exploring materiality. This is very apparent in his sculptural work, he uses an elaborate mixture of materials, including plaster, carbon fibre, found objects, and archival material, which he disrupts, deconstructs and restructures through various physical and digital processes. ‘Rephrasing’ elements of their construction, he also dismantles and repurposes their means and systems of display. Central to the sculptural assembly are quotations from his own family archive. Fragments of texts from his mother’s, uncle’s and son’s school notebooks serve as reflecting points of temporality.

This association/disassociation approach continues in Tonsfeldt’s new film, Drm Connections (2023). Here he combines unscripted intimate everyday moments, appropriate audio and scripted archival video footage – parts of which were created in collaboration with Uri Aran during their time together at graduate school – to build larger compositions or visual assemblages that transcend, disrupt and challenge temporal, formal and narrative axes.

Josh Tonsfeldt received an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2007 and a BA from Purchase College in 2004. Since then, his work has been shown widely in the United States and Europe, most recently at international institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the DeCordova Museum (Boston), Mass MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts), Gamec (Bergamo, Italy), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto).  His work is in the collection of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vancouver Gallery of Art, the Parrish Museum, and the Perez Museum in Miami.  He is represented by Broadway Gallery in New York