RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, currently on view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, British artist Peter Liversidge wrote sixty proposals, including performances and physical artworks across a variety of mediums. Of these, twenty-four have been selected for realization and—with some help from local residents—will be presented at the Museum and in the surrounding neighborhood as part of Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place, which will be on view until February 5, 2017. For the past decade, Liversidge’s (born 1973, Lincoln, UK) practice has begun with the creation of conceptually based proposals. Typed on an old manual typewriter, these proposals—complete with typographical errors and hand annotations—describe ideas from the practical to the far-fetched. The chosen proposals, guided by the concept of connecting the interior of The Aldrich Museum with both the surrounding landscape and community, include working with the employees of Ridgefield Hardware to write a song about the store that they will publicly perform; firing a cannonball into the Museum’s wall in reference to the action during the Revolutionary War that led to a British cannonball being embedded in the wall of the Keeler Tavern, Ridgefield’s Colonial-era historical site; and the fabrication of nine shallow, circular aluminum pans whose relative sizes correspond to the nine largest lakes in Connecticut, with the pans being subsequently filled with water from the specific lakes.

Aldrich exhibitions director Richard Klein, the curator of the exhibition, explains, “Liversidge’s way of working echoes artists such as Sol LeWitt, in that his ideas are open to interpretation by others in the specific manner in which they are realized. Unlike LeWitt, however, he is anything but a formalist, engaging every conceivable approach to cultural production with an emphasis on ideas that are extremely accessible to the general public. Liversidge’s physical works are usually made of everyday materials or are created by simple, transitory actions and his performative works commonly utilize people who don’t think of themselves as performers. His work is a reminder that art can be created out of almost anything and that realizing a simple idea can result in anything but a simple outcome. Liversidge is just as interested in his proposals that are not realized, as they have their own life in each viewer’s imagination.”

Liversidge has worked with a diverse range of institutions, including the Tate Gallery, London in 2008, the Centre d’art Santa Mónica, Barcelona in 2008, Bloomberg SPACE, London in 2009, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2010, the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2014 and most recently the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 2015. He has also developed projects for the Europalia Festival in 2007, Edinburgh’s sculpture park, Jupiter Artland, in 2009, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2010, the Armory Art Fair in 2011, and the Tate Modern, London in 2013. In 2012, Peter Liversidge began collaborating with Low, a band from Duluth, Minnesota, which ultimately resulted in Liversidge creating a backdrop for their international tour as well as several album covers and release proposals. In 2013 the Edinburgh Art Festival commissioned Liversidge’s Flags for Edinburgh, which toured to The MAC, Belfast in 2014. Peter Liversidge lives and works in London, England.