Inna Babaeva “It’s the Little Things That Matter”

TSA

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Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture by Inna Babaeva, whose recent work is a series of interventions with IKEA furniture and their store displays, an ongoing body of work called IKEA Invasions.

“IKEA products are omnipresent and fill homes all over the world with identical, recognizable items. Marius stool, Magnarp floor lamp, Rusch clock – you see them everywhere- in friends’ homes, office buildings, movie theaters, art galleries, etc. So, when I began using items from IKEA as a departure source for my sculptures, it was the uniformity of our living environments that I questioned. In an attempt to defy the mundane, I augmented the IKEA products - clocks, chairs, coat hangers, shelves and picture frames - and turned them into absurdly humanized and deviant objects. Also, by doing so, I turned mass-produced objects that belonged on in-store displays of discount stores, into objects ultimately aimed for an art gallery space. The guerilla style act of bringing my completed sculptures back to IKEA was a contemplation on matters of commodity values and how they change due to contextual displacement: does visual embellishment of consumer goods make them more precious by entering the value system of art, or does it make them less attractive because of their practical uselessness? “ -Inna Babaeva

Inna Babaeva was born in Lvov, Ukraine. She holds an MFA degree from Rutgers University. She is a recipient of the Sharpe-Walentas Foundation Studio program fellowship and she is a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant nominee. She exhibited at Anna Kustera Gallery, Brian Morris Gallery, Underdonk, Francis Naumann Gallery, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her work has been reviewed in ARTnews, ArtFCity, Artnet Magazine, Sleek Magazine (Berlin), We Heart Magazine (London). She lives and works in New York City.