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Who is making what for whom? What is making whom for what?

Prior to embarking on the IKEA Living Project Series, Shinobu Akimoto produced another work that laid the foundation for the complex and tangential space that the current project inhabits; the earlier piece framed the central questions that the IKEA works are predicated upon. In 1998, Shinobu came upon some small, daily ads in a London, Ontario community newspaper that were sponsored by the House Rabbit Society. The majority of these took the form of pleas or admonishments directed at owners and non-owners of rabbits to consider the well-being of the furry creatures the society had named itself for. Eventually, as a result of her dedication to the classifieds, Shinobu had the good fortune to meet with Debra, a society member, whose knitting talents included the ability to make tiny, white rabbit finger puppets -- each one finished with black details on its face. The cost of each puppet was $1.00, which Debra donated to a charitable cause. And so a professional relationship began between Shinobu ("the artist"), and Debra ("the artist") that yielded a group of one hundred knitted bunnies.

It would be easy to accuse the artist (Shinobu) of the kind of ironic posturing of many contemporary cultural workers that manifests a fascination with the seemingly "pathetic" gestures considered culture-making among the middle class. And, it would be as easy to accuse the artist (Debra) of subscribing to a model that insists on the commodification of any kind of aesthetic production, no matter how institutionalized or domesticated. However, if we suspend these accusations in favour of viewing this project as a collaboration established according to mutual respect between artists; on a fair exchange of money for labour; on the self-understanding of each participant as operating according to her own definition of artistic integrity, then we must think of the work differently. Our most significant consideration must then engage the questions: "Who is making what for whom, and what is making whom for what?" Like a four-sided coin, the project declares that each time artistic authority is ascribed more fully to one of the producers, and/or each time the legitimating processes that attribute the title "art-making" to one side of the production model, the remaining "sides" of the work are obscured to the extent that the whole gesture becomes meaningless. It is only when the precarious balance between dual producers and tandem "worlds" (art/life) is acknowledged that the project operates as completely as possible: across a field of hybrid social subjectivities (artists/citizens) and in the intersection of contexts (the art world/daily life). Ultimately, these complex domains are what overproduce the identities of those who think of themselves as "artists," and of some of those who do not.