Jeff Carter

Built primarily from the affordable design retailer’s furniture, Jeff Carter’s new sculptures—all appropriately entitled Catalog —use IKEA not only for its modern forms, but also for its conceptual content. Like Apple, Target, or any other corporation that has harnessed the political power of Jeff Carter and IKEA: Movement as Material, simple utilitarian design, the aesthetic of IKEA has been absorbed into the everyday. Carter’s use of the brand’s signature items is a clever extension of his ongoing study of how tourism and movement relate to the construction of place. Where past works employed items from Carter’s experiences in China, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and focused on the experience of cultural difference, the Catalog series is the inverse; it examines the experience of repetition and the production of the same. - College of DuPage