Our teams were assembled over buttered steak and lobster to celebrate the
closing of a $46.6 million dollar deal. Only an extravagant affair could properly
celebrate the successful “monetization of the downside”. As I washed down my
steak with a swig of Cabernet and listened to the jolly-for-now executives trade
the latest capital markets gossip, it was obvious that things in the corporate world
are the same today as they always were.

Working in institutional investment sales during and after the 2008 market
collapse charged and galvanized my art practice. From that vantage, I became
interested in how business conventions and corporate value systems shape our
cultural landscape beyond Wall Street. This creative direction led me to the 2011
SOMA Summer artist residency in Mexico City, where I developed a series of
paintings and collages of corporate conference rooms. These works are both
objects and performative practice, as I secretly infiltrated and photographed the
offices of Deutsche Bank, Dupont, and the Mexican Stock Exchange. The works
examine these spaces as metonyms for corporate identity, considering how the
design and layout of the room contribute to the company’s image, asking who
has access to these rooms, and what activities they enable.

My latest project - New Normal - is a series of fictional corporate trophies. As
mementos of significant business deals, corporate awards are anthropological
relics of business culture. They demarcate milestones in our economic history
and offer a glimpse into the vernacular of capitalism.

My pieces appropriate corporate aesthetics and colloquial language to examine
the values of transnational businesses that nearly collapsed the economy. By
focusing on the framework for reward rather than the consequences of failure,
this work is a critical reconsideration of the “meritocracy” that purports to drive
capitalist success. Tacky and badly made, they suggest the detrimental effects of
wanton praise by revealing their material insignificance.