Holistic Approach: Alina Tenser - Oct 22 - Jan 18, 2013

Reception: January 17, 2013, 6:00 - 8:00 PM

On October 22, 2012 Alina Tenser will begin work on Holistic Approach, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation. For Holistic Approach, Tenser will create a series of sculptures, images and videos that begin with her body and extend into new, related forms.

Tenser proposes that the artist’s body—the agent effecting material— is an inner body that is figureless, empathetic and malleable; it is a body-blob. By extension, the contact point, where hands meet resistance, is the agent that defines material form while simultaneously delimiting the form of the artist.

Constructing space around her self, without preconceived notions of structure, Tenser will build up moments of contact, amassing blind details that will support each other. This tableau will be an ongoing site for performance throughout the duration of its making. As a result, object, body, and image will continually inform one another, compromising, shifting and redefining fragmented limbs of a larger figure.

Holistic Approach will attempt to present the artists’ understanding of her body’s relationship to her artwork. The immersive environment of interdependent forms, will consider how fragmentation and autonomy not only reveal the whole but also bring an intimate understanding of what it is like to be whole.

About the Artist:
Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian born sculptor and video artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA where she has taught as Adjunct Faculty and served as Director of Summer Studio Program. This year she was awarded the Dedalus MFA Fellowship from the Robert Motherwell Foundation.

For more information contact [email protected].

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.