May Tveit at Gallery at Village Shalom - Kansas City

Large-scale and formal succinctness are hallmarks of Kansas City artist May Tveit's sculptural installations, Trained in industrial design, Tveit typically employs ready-to-hand objects and structures from the Midwestern vernacular in order to reveal their latent meanings and visual dynamism. For a public-art project last summer, Tveit hung huge pastel curtains from the exterior of an old building in downtown Kansas City. In a recent group show, she exhibited bales of hay arranged in a casually tumbled row, each bale coated with a thick skin of paint in a different bright color.

For this exhibition, titled "Retail Therapy," Tveit created her version of a suburban superstore, resplendent in red, white and blue. The piece was inspired, the artist says, by President Bush's post-Sept. 11 redefinition of shopping as a patriotic act. The work also took into account the gallery's proximity to a suburban shopping district. In the two-story space, Tveit erected three sets of 15-foot-high shelving units and lined them with wood pallets, stocking each with orderly rows of inflated king-size balloons. She painted one unit and its pallets red and filled it with red balloons; the middle display was painted white and held white balloons; the third was blue. Each balloon was imprinted with a single word. The red balloons offered "security," "normalcy," "relief"; the blue ones had "before," "belong," "duty." Tveit used the white balloons in the center to remind viewers of their inalienable rights: "happiness," "liberty," "life."

The narrowness of the aisles between the shelves helped convey that superstore feeling of goods looming in abundance, and, as in a real superstore, the installation featured a limited range of products available in quantities. Speaking about her inventory of intangibles, Tveit said that the terms had been "extrapolated from the daily dose of the media" following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Indeed, the numbing repetition did recall last fall's barrage of patriotic media bromides.

Implicit in the structure of Tveit's piece was an acknowledgment of the regimentation and conformity that surface in times of uncertainty. Contributing a rare element of animation to this strict array, the balloons, like cheery promotional "sale" markers or the talking heads of TV pundits, nodded and lilted ever so slightly as viewers passed.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group