Constance Tenvik

6Month Space is proud to present Tween, a solo exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and video by Constance Tenvik.

Tenvik’s practice displays a preoccupation with the theatrical; she sculpts, draws, and paints archetypical characters, sews extravagant costumes for them, and brings them to life through performative action. Working in various media, she often recycles existing works into new projects, incorporating them as the props or backdrops for her fanciful created tableaus.

In her 2016 video, Preludes, she performs as a disparate group of characters: a blue-robed bather chanting a haunting song through a metal sink strainer, a bearded trumpet-playing puppeteer, and a robed woman whose dress unfurls into a red carpet. The video ends with Tenvik clad as a sorceress shadow-puppeteer. She appears both in front of the curtain, pondering the selection of paper silhouettes that she will activate, and behind the curtain as a flattened silhouette herself, existing in dual states – as puppet and the puppeteer, activated and activator. Such is the logic of this fictive world: appearances shift and deceive, allowing room for alternate and performed depictions of the self.

This re-imagining of reality recurs throughout Tenvik’s work. The main room of the exhibition will contain a variation of the mop sculpture series recently shown at the Kristiansand Kunsthall in Norway. Tenvik turns the mop upside down and its absorbent tendrils become locks of hair, revealing the unexpected anthropomorphic characteristics of this banal household item. In this exhibition, each sculpture wears a customized wig or sweatshirt; a gaggle of teenagers congregating in the space.

Constance Tenvik (b. 1990; Oslo, Norway) is an artist whose works have been included in various exhibitions including Creeper (Deli Projects, Basel, Switzerland, 2016), Game Of Life III (Kristiansand Kunsthall , Norway, 2016), Partners (Abrons Art Center, New York, USA, 2016), Collection As Allocated Objects (Tidenes Krav, Oslo, Norway, 2014), and Tournament d'Objet (Charlottenborg Kunsthall, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2013). She lives and works in New York City.