What Box? – MKG127

What Box ? is Laura Kikauka‘s third solo exhibition at MKG127. The exhibition contains a series of dioramas and a video installation created in collaboration with designer and software developer, Carl Hamfelt. The work in the exhibtion was created at Kikauka’s Funny Farm, a living installation located near Meaford in rural Ontario. The dioramas are sculptural collages created from Kikauka’s collections of ephemera gathered locally as well as during her years based in Berlin.

Laura Kikauka‘s body of work over the past twenty-five years encompasses various mediums including site specific installation, mixed media, electronic sculpture, drawing, photography, video, performance, music, text and costume creations. Kikauka’s installations establish a highly specific visual (and often audio) language that blends the increasingly overlapping worlds of high and low art forms. In general Laura’s ‘excessive aesthetic’ is comparable to urban archeology and addresses issues of consumer culture, and the question of good and bad taste. It also celebrates failure in a humourous and ironic manner.

Kikauka’s work is inspired and derived from decades of on-going collecting of found objects. Employing the formal strategy of meticulously sorting and organizing these objects, as well as modifying or transforming them, she then creates specifically themed and coded installations that transform gallery and exhibition spaces into densely packed, highly detailed installations.

Laura’s categorization speaks of similarities and differences. The Funny Farm studios in rural Meaford and former ones in Berlin & NY are living and working spaces treated as on-going installations that exemplify, through a density of detail her interest in low class consumer culture. It is with a sense of sarcasm and empathy that she explores this reoccurring theme.