bust/boom

bust/boom

Richard Ibghy & Marilou LemmensGabrielle L’Hirondelle HillAn Te LiuGordon Matta-ClarkHwayeon Nam

Curated by Noa Bronstein and Deborah Wang

Opening reception Friday, May 25, 8PM. Admission is free and open to the public.

To date, the 2008 financial crisis is arguably one of the most significant events of the 21st century, an event that continues to impact our cultural, political, architectural, and economic landscape. bust/boom offers an attempt to make visible the complex and often immaterial ways we are affected by economic cycles. This exhibition strives to better understand both the visible and invisible conditions of our time, especially living and working within the aftershocks of “the crash.” It is therefore an investigative exploration into our own desire to continue to ask what happened and why. Given that 2018 marks the ten-year anniversary of the crash, this exhibition offers a reflection that engages perspectives before, at the time of, and after the historic event. bust/boom is also particularly timely within the specific context of The New Gallery given the highly cyclical and globally dependent economic history of Calgary as a city reliant on a single-extraction resource commodity.

bust/boom features several works that explore the abstract and tangible markers of economic cycles, as well as the very real ways that the financial crisis affects individuals, communities, and places. Offering a kind of metonymic approach, the exhibition further traces the cyclical and provisional nature of commodities and markets. Hwayeon Nam’s Botany of Desire intersperses images of the 17th century Dutch tulip mania with the stock market crash of 2008. The video combines the frantic sounds of a trading floor, broadcasts relating to recent stock market crashes, fluctuating stock market graphs, and colourful tulips deformed by viruses. By conflating the first speculative bubble (“tulip mania”) with the abstract ways contemporary markets function, Nam’s video addresses a complexity of discourses related to value and globalized economies. The work further compels an image of uncertainty, and the unpredictable character of markets and economies, which she visually relates to the volatility of natural cycles.