Public Studio: Drone Wedding

Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky
Artists

Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky founded Public Studio in 2009. Together they make public installations, video works, image-based sculpture, and photographs drawing on and subverting traditional documentary and landscape practices. Much of their work scrutinizes conflict zones, seeking traces of warfare and its impact in scenes of the everyday. Their recent collaborations include Full Spectrum (2014), a public art memorial for victims of AIDS; Under the Last Sky (2013), an installation exploring automated surveillance imagery and drone warfare; Road Shots (2012), laser-cut photographs, and Road Movie (2011), a six-screen video installation, both of which explore Israel’s segregated highway system intersecting and dividing the West Bank; and Kino Pravda 3G (2010–12), a series of video installations looking at current public dissent and protests worldwide.

Dr. Gaelle Morel
Curator

Dr. Gaelle Morel is an art historian and Exhibitions Curator at The Image Centre (formerly Ryerson Image Centre), Toronto, Canada. She received her PhD in the History of Contemporary Art from Universite Paris 1 – Pantheon-Sorbonne, France. Her research and recent work deal with the figure of the artist as author in French contemporary photography. She also works on the artistic and cultural recognition of the medium in the United States in the 1930s. She was, until 2013, a member of the board of the Societe francaise de photographie, and a member of the editorial committee of Etudes photographiques, a bilingual peer reviewed journal on the history of photography. She edited Les Derniers Tableaux. Photojournalisme et art contemporain (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 2008) and co-wrote with Thierry Gervais La Photographie published by Editions Larousse in France (2008, 2011). She was a recipient of a Terra Foundation for American Art Travel Grant in 2007, for her work on the American art dealer Julien Levy who closely worked with Berenice Abbott in the 1920s and 1930s.