What’s the Value of a Dollar?

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Patrice Renee Washington, Chester Vincent Toye, Shellie Zhang, Sean Weisgerber, TJ Shin, and GTA Collective, "What’s the Value of a Dollar?"

Courtesy of the gallery

Saturday September 24th. What’s the Value of a Dollar? will be open from 12PM until 11PM, with $uraj on the ones and twos from 8PM - 10PM.

What’s the Value of a Dollar? invites 6 artists and collectives to examine how profit-driven entities have historically exploited and dominated societies, communities, and bodies. Using video, installation, photography, and painting, the exhibition enfolds complex matrices of racial politics, socio-economic (dis)parity, and political agency to argue that North American economies not only exist, but flourish through marginalizing their own consumers and workforce. Capitalist frameworks feed off of subjugated bodies to reinforce economically productive hierarchies of race, culture, gender, and affluence. The exhibition’s title questions how monetary capital is traded and valued against ethical, cultural, and physical sacrifice. Included works employ capitalistic visual language, which acts in protest against market-based economies. Research-based approaches are utilized to historically map capitalism’s reliance on the communities it targets and marginalizes. What’s the Value of a Dollar? argues that there cannot be ethical consumption and production under capitalism, and offers ways to reclaim agency by co-opting corporate tactics and language historically used to disenfranchise.”

Artists:

Patrice Renee Washington (based in Newburgh, NY) has shown in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, including solo exhibitions at both Marinaro Gallery, Brooklyn; Underdonk Gallery in Brooklyn; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Group exhibitions include shows at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Brooklyn; We Buy Gold, Brooklyn; Sculpture Center, Queens; the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver; Zeitgeist, Nashville; Abrons Art Center, New York; 47 Canal, New York, and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn. Residencies include Abrons Arts Center; Anderson Ranch Arts Center; Snowmass, CO; Lighthouse Works; Fishers Island, NY; the Museum of Art and Design, NY, and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.

Chester Vincent Toye is an award-winning filmmaker using horror and dark comedy to work through his realities of race, visibility, labor, and commodification. He received an MFA in Photography from UCLA and has studied improv at Upright Citizens Brigade Los Angeles. His debut short film I’m SO Sorry premiered on No Budge in March 2021 and was named to the 2021 No Budge Films of the Year list. I’m SO Sorry went on to be an Official Selection at the Indie Memphis Film Festival where it won “Best Short” in the After Dark category. Chester approaches his films with a background in portrait photography and has long been interested in the complexity of representation. Chester has worked closely with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas (Hangtime Executive Producer) and experimental filmmaker Stanya Kahn. Growing up he was a standout athlete eventually playing Division 1 lacrosse at Lehigh University. His path to filmmaking has been far from traditional and he is grateful for the range of experiences, relationships, and perspectives that he is able to bring to his films.

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.

TJ Shin is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and speciesism. Inspired by decentralized ecologies and queer sociality, they create living installations and imagine an ever-expanding self that exists beyond the boundaries of one’s skin. Shin is a 2020 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow and 2020 Visiting Artist Fellow at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. Shin has exhibited internationally at the Queens Museum, Lewis Center for the Arts, Wave Hill, Recess, Doosan Gallery, Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, Cuchifritos Gallery, Knockdown Center, and Cody Dock, London. 

GTA (Gentrification Tax Action) is a group of friends, artists, and architects (Kika Thorne, Jane Hutton, Sameer Farooq, Adrian Blackwell) who have formed a collective to fight the predatory real estate market in our neighborhoods. Their installation aims to build a campaign for a Gentrification Tax in Toronto – a declining percentage tax of the after-inflation increase in home prices over ten years. The income from the tax will be used to support local community-controlled housing initiatives such as land trusts and cooperatives.

Sean Weisgerber is an artist based in Toronto working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and installation. His work centres on the nexus of art and commerce with an interest in how art and labour are commodified. He studied at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Vancouver) and Chelsea College of Art (London). His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Canada, exhibiting at The Plumb (Toronto), Open Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), Wil Aballe Art Projects (Vancouver), the Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon), AKA Artist-Run (Saskatoon), Cooper Cole Gallery (Toronto) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) as a finalist in the RBC Painting Competition. He has forthcoming exhibitions at Ace Art (Winnipeg) and The Foreman Gallery at Bishop’s University (Sherbrooke).

Matthew Kyba is the current Curator of Contemporary Art for the Ministry of Culture & Tourism (Columbus, OH). Recent curated exhibitions include both singular and touring projects at Museum London, The Ottawa Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, and multiple contemporary art spaces across Canada.