Morph Estate
2005. A site-specific installation at OVERGADEN – Institute For Contemporary Art, Copenhagen.
From presentation of exhibition:
”The Swedish artist Lena Ignestam, has in her exhibition at Overgaden created a course of events, partly consisting of sculptures in varies sizes and shapes, partly of different drawings. The title, Morph Estate, is also the title of, what must be considered the main piece of the exhibition, namely a large sculpture-installation. The piece “Morph Estate” is made up of a big brown coloured wooden room, with a decor based in a typically bourgeois style with stuccoes and ornaments. The immediately recognisable interior details in the room are however overgrown, oversized and distorted. The original planes and surfaces are broken, as panels and ornaments have sunken in or spread out over the walls. In one place a corner has drifted away and in another corner a ray of light has found it’s way through a crack. Lena Ignestam has designed and constructed the room in collaboration with the architects Karin Andersson and Martin Sundberg, and it’s in the confrontation between the architecture and the visual art, that the piece comes into being.
The piece deals with, through the physical distortion of a conventional room, themes like change and transformation of norms, values and ideals. Within the work there seem to be a sliding movement away from the established norms, the rules for forms and structures within a living space. In “Morph Estate” the familiar and solid forms are displaced and through this displacement “the norms of structure”, their establishment and maintenance, are problematized and the work poses the question why we subject ourselves to and follow these norms and ideal.
Exhibitionview at Overgarden: Morph Estate, Geneflower and The Collector:
Exhibitionview at Overgarden: on wall Pulse, and on floor Heroes:
Exhibitionview at Overgarden: Geneflower and The Collector:
Detail: Heroes (Plaster with bruises (watercolor). Varying dimensions: 40 – 70 cm.)
Interior of Morph Estate:
