LOS ANGELES — Earlier this summer, artists Sophie Lynn Morris and Thomas Macie met at the IKEA store in Burbank, grabbed a cup of coffee and rolled their carts through the affordable Scandi furniture showrooms and warehouse, mingling with dozens of couples, roommates and families.
Morris looked up the exact coordinates of the driveway and the trash can she had jotted down on a notepad, but instead of locating the flat-packed components for a couch or table, she found a column that a worker’s forklift had crashed into, leaving a gash in the plaster. She took out a jar of MÅLA modeling clay from IKEA and pressed it into the hole, then carefully removed the plaster and stored it safely in a cardboard box as an archaeological specimen. Further coordinates led them to a long crack in the concrete floor, which they covered with sheets of MÅLA colored paper, rubbing the crack with MÅLA crayons. Macie then found a quiet alley and pulled out a handful of coins, hammering them into the holes in one leg of the shelves that spilled out into the cavernous warehouse, creating a site-specific work with nods to Donald Judd’s minimalist stacks and the modular nature of IKEA furniture.
Morris and Macie take part in the very first IKEA Residence, an unofficial guerrilla program founded by artists and writers Mary Boo Anderson and Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf. The pair said Hyperallergic that they created the residence in response to the disappearance of public spaces where people can congregate for free. They also cited as inspiration the work of Guy Ben-Ner, who used IKEA showrooms as sets to surreptitiously film steal beauty (2007), a pseudo-sitcom featuring his family.
Although a multinational, IKEA blurs the line between public and private, providing a welcoming atmosphere where people can gather, eat a meal, and stroll aspirationally through clean, utilitarian interiors.
“The idea is to capitalize on this mecca of capitalism for more creative and authentic pursuits,” the residency’s website explains. The residency does not offer a stipend or studio, but rather an open invitation to interdisciplinary collaboration, conversation, and creation.
After launching a call on Instagram, they received around 75 applications, from which they chose 14 artists and writers. They grouped them into pairs, linking some based on similarities in their work, and bringing together others whose different practices they thought would make interesting collaborations. The only stipulation is that each artist pair had to meet once at IKEA and then join the whole group for dinner (at the IKEA cafe, of course) to discuss the experience. The results varied widely, with some duos creating work at IKEA and About IKEA and others simply using the store as a sort of shared workspace to brainstorm and work on different concepts.
Morris and Macie collaboration responds to IKEA controversies wood supply practices and what they see as a “greenwashing” policy to mask the Swedish company deleterious environmental impact. Their rubbings and plasticine moldings highlight cracks in IKEA’s serene capitalist facade.
“We ask, ‘how can you be an ethical consumer?'” Macie said. “And the impossibility of that,” Morris followed. For better or worse, IKEA is a ubiquitous feature of contemporary American life, offering affordable, well-designed, albeit sometimes short-lived products. The two artists have already integrated IKEA products into their work, demonstrating their ubiquity.
Rosie Mayer and Emma Peters also sought to undermine the site’s inherent commercialism, covering an IKEA table with their drawings of IKEA furniture and food, filtered through their family memories and reproduced on a Risograph press. The table will be used as an art exchange site at Mayer’s Art Space in Atwater Village, Nova Community Arts.
Jacky Tran said Hyperallergic he had all but abandoned the art world recently, having moved from a social practice to a more financially stable position as an editor. For the residency, he spent a day at IKEA interviewing customers and employees about their lives. “Am I back in social practice?” he thought. Her interviews will be collected in a zine with contributions from writer Cora Lee, who flew in from San Diego for the residency.
Artist Michael Haight and writer Leah Clancy spent hours at IKEA, discussing several ideas over two meals, before settling on a collaboration in which Clancy will create new stories based on Haight’s evocative paintings. Haight is such a big IKEA fan that he traveled to Sweden just to visit the first IKEA store. “It’s like a microdosing utopia,” he said.
With a nod to Ben-Ner’s cinematic intervention, Caitlin Forst and Robben Muñoz filmed a series of dream re-enactments – both unconscious and ambitious – at IKEA featuring their artist friends. Forst notes that IKEA’s maze of showrooms and “liminal spaces” provided a perfect setting for their fantasy scenarios.
At the post-residency dinner, over plates of Swedish meatballs, smoked salmon and lingonberry jam, Anderson and Blair-Schlagenhauf celebrated the success of the first round of residency, with future editions planned for fall and winter. They ignored concerns that the mega-retailer would sue them in light of Official IKEA Artist-in-Residence Programwhich was announced in April with Annie Leibovitz as the first artist.
“If IKEA sues us, I’ll be happy,” joked Blair-Schlagenhauf. “But I don’t think it’s a very contentious business. It would be one thing if we wreaked havoc, but we use it as a public space. »
