Industriel-viscéral

Ikenaga assembles and rearranges familiar objects like furniture, windows, tables, chairs, and structural tubing to create artworks that question the modernist canon of forms and probe into the implicit assumptions of industrial design. Her mock-functional assemblages oscillate between Surrealist collage and postmodernist citation and reveal the poetic potential of the banal and the everyday life.

In Industrial-visceral, the artist shows a new series of sculptural arrangements in which she combines common materials – such as chrome tubing and wooden boards – with household items – such as trays, cups and vases. The resulting artworks are left in a state of limbo between construction and deconstruction, suggesting both presence and absence. While they nod to domestic furniture, such as bookcases or clothes rails, the artist’s sculptures are also evocative of museum contexts, as they adopt an ambiguous role between artworks on display and systems of presentation. Ikenaga resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological exploration of the house in Poetics of Space (1958) and reveals the domestic sphere as a site of visible and hidden experience, intellect and emotion, presence and memory.