What's The Value of a Dollar?

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Chester Vincent Toye, "Telsa Toucher," 2020

video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Curated by Matt Kyba

Artists // Patrice Renee Washington/ Sean Weisgerber/ GTA  Collective (Kika Thorne, Jane Hutton, Sameer Farooq, Adrian Blackwell)/ Chester Toye/ and Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin

What’s the Value of a Dollar? invites 5 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.

Specific economic 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 a capitalistic visual language that acts in protest against market-based economies. Research-based approaches are brought into contact to historically map capitalism’s reliance on the communities it targets and marginalizes. What is 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.