MAY TVEIT: JOURNEY
April 5 – May 25, 2025
Artist Reception | Sunday, April 13 | 1-4pm | Artist Talk at 2pm
Tveit shares her path – one that weaves family history, the materials of commerce and industry, and self-reflection – in JOURNEY and invites viewers to do the same.
Tveit is a sculptor and printmaker and comes from a long line of builders and craftspersons. In a studio visit leading up to JOURNEY, Tveit mentioned home builders and furniture makers and a sculptor on her maternal and paternal sides. Tveit gleaned valuable knowledge from her family and honed those skills in art and design at the Rhode Island of School of Design and, later, the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy.
Looking at examples of Tveit’s past work (below), we clearly see the artist’s penchant for ubiquitous, readymade objects. Tveit has employed mass produced items like buckets and balloons or standardized materials such as hay bales and words to launch conversations on a myriad of subjects. Among them, forgotten female labor histories, shopping as a patriotic act, land development and consumption, and most recently, metaphysical aspects of the self and being.
In JOURNEY, Tveit shows us her most recent material of admiration and application – cardboard. Corrugated cardboard is almost inescapable in modern American life. As consumers, we often place a high value on what is inside our boxes, but pay little mind to the materials that hold them.
Beyond exploring themes around the materials she applies, Tveit codes her work with personal meaning through scale and layering. In a multi-year collaboration with the Lawrence Paper Company, Tveit often set her own height – 68″ – for the largest iteration of her unfurled boxes. When we think of layering we often think of geology and time. With this knowledge, we begin to see works like You and Me through a different lens. As we approach Tveit’s sculptural work and traverse its gradations, we are met by the artist’s presence.
The sense of depth Tveit builds in her sculptural pieces continues in her works on paper. Tveit applies cardboard in her monoprints, but through a different medium, and with different ends. The processes – sometimes with the assistance of a machine tool-head and others through “building” prints of inked cardboard – create a receding, ghostly effect. Unlike You and Me and some of the models in JOURNEY, which jut out from their base planes, these forms seem to hold space. Spatial themes are not diminished in these works but retooled. Some may think of the crafted niches in Tveit’s monoprints as a sort of mihrab or shrine.
Artist Statement
I am an artist taking the materials of commerce and industry and using them to build abstractions, critique culture, and explore the human condition. My current sculpture and works on paper are abstract, geometric self-portraits. I explore configurations of universal cardboard boxes and metaphysical aspects of being human. The Universal Boxes series use flattened, splayed open, universal box template forms to build architectonic volumes, scaled to the dimensions of my body. I stack and glue cardboard sheets together, each nesting within the original footprint of the mother form. In the Drop Unit series, the precision of each added layer creates the illusion that the works have been carved into. Embedded in the objects I create are geographic, psychological, and emotional memory. My corresponding printmaking practice further explores formal and poetic ideas about the box as body, compartmentalization, and the self. The monoprints explore spaces of light and vibration and are built with print matrices using the same materials, processes and tooling that I build my sculptural works. As an artist embedded within industry, I have been working with the people and the tools of the trade in a factory that makes corrugated cardboard and packaging products. I studied sculpture through the field of industrial design in both the US and Italy, learning from radical designers and thinkers who blurred the lines between art, design, and architecture. I am deeply interested in art as experience, whether in the gallery or integrated into everyday life and the landscape.
Bio
May Tveit’s large scale and formally succinct sculptural work and installations are impactful, relevant and memorable. Found in traditional art venues or in nontraditional settings her installations may exist for a few hours, days, or longer.
She typically employs readymade products and architectural structures to investigate systems of order, desire, and use. Her current sculpture and works on paper explore geometric configurations of cardboard boxes and physical/metaphysical aspects of the self and being.
Tveit’s recent solo, two person and group exhibitions include (Cosmic Geometries) Secrist Beach Gallery, (Living, Being) Farmprojects, (Universal Boxes) Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, (Fields, Planes, Systems: Self) Farmprojects, (Drop Unit) Greenlease Gallery (Template Days) UK Art Museum and (Art on Paper) at the Weatherspoon Museum.
Her work has been featured in Art in America, Art Papers, National Public Radio, Bad at Sports, among other periodicals. Tveit is a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellow and has participated in the Anderson Ranch Art Center, Haystack, Art Omi, Frans Masereel Centrum, residency programs. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied in Rome with the RISD European Honors Program, and received her Masters degree from the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Kansas City Art Institute, and currently the University of Kansas.
