Making Dollars

A group exhibition at the Cambridge Innovation Center 1 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142 June 8 - November 18, 2012 var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-32003144-1']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'tumblr.com']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

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My time in the finance industry / other agenda, 2005

Noah Feehan / AKA is an artist, programmer, and researcher currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Feehan received his Master's Degree at MIT’s Media Lab where he experimented with hyperinstruments, robotics, and locative media. He also worked at the Cambridge Innovation Center for several years. Prior to his time in Cambridge, Feehan worked in the Human Resources department of a prominent hedge fund in Midtown Manhattan. He was deemed as an “Other Agenda” hire, which he explains is “a term the fund coined to acknowledge the agreement that I would work diligently from 9 to 5, and then I use the rest of my time to pursue my Other Agenda, with no career-oriented pressure to put in extra hours at work or generally be interested in finance.” In the competitive and ambitious environment of high finance, Feehan found that working only within an eight hour day was not exactly possible. In turn, he devised a private “in-kind” system of exchange where would reward himself time for art projects after working overtime. “Making Dollars” features the photographic evidence of these artistic favors, including self-portraits made before a particularly demanding “Take Your Child To Work Day”, and reenactments of classic management texts, such as Harvard Negotiation Project’s Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most--which reminds the reader that “conflict is a growth industry”.

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Boston-based multimedia artist Mister Never, née Gregory Burdett, often creates works that incorporate his tag name. Mister Never presents Take The Money And Run / Rubber Stacks for “Making Dollars”, in which he has redesigned the US hundred dollar bill into a version that utilizes his name and signature iconography of cartoon hearts, clouds, and tears. These bills were created as a response to the controversial practice of fractional reserve banking. An earlier version was originally featured in a large scale installation entitled “In Never We Trust” at Artspace in New Haven, CT in June 2010, which is pictured above.

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Carlin Wing is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY.  She received her MFA from CalArts in 2008 and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.  She has been a visiting faculty member in the art departments of Harvard, Vanderbilt, and Watkins College of Art and Design.  While teaching at Harvard, she also organized “Bizarre Animals,” the one-night art takeover at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and put up a solo show, Ceilings Where I Sleep: May 2005-May 2010, at Anthony Greaney.

Wing is also a former professional squash player, and has documented this little-known sport over the last few years with a series entitled Hitting Walls. For “Making Dollars”, Wing will exhibit her Glass Court photographs, including a large-scale photograph and a number of deteriorated webgrabs—images that Wing pulled from the internet and scaled so that the size of the court in each image is approximately the size of a regulation squash ball. In these photographs, the courts bear the names and logos of the financial companies sponsoring the matches, and they are also situated in front of political and cultural powerhouses, such as the Field Museum in Chicago, Symphony Hall in Boston, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and London’s Tower Bridge.

The video above is an excerpt from her 2008 video Building Observations, which documents the construction of a glass court in New York's Grand Central Terminal for the Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions. The event was held in January 2008, while Bear Stearns filed for bankruptcy in March of that year and was soon absorbed by JP Morgan. The 2009 event became the JP Morgan Tournament of Champions.

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top: CFYW Brighton Triple. bottom: CFYW Miami Billboard 2011. 

Cash For Your Warhol is an ongoing public art project by artist Geoff Hargadon. The campaign began shortly after the financial meltdown of 2008. Over the last four years, Hargadon has prolifically installed variations of the series guerilla-style in the streets on standard plastic signage, and through the cooperation of cultural and media partners, such as Clear Channel, which provided billboard space in Boston and Miami. For “Making Dollars”, Hargadon has created a limited edition version with the Cambridge Innovation Center in mind. The exhibition will also mark the public debut of the voicemails left to the advertised CFYW phone number, which range from serious inquiries to drunk dials made late at night.

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Left: Jess Wheelock and Catherine McMahon. Be Yourself, 2011. Right: Animation playing inside of Dale's book How to Win Friends and Influence People, 2010.

Jess Wheelock is a multimedia artist currently based in San Francisco. She received her MFA at MIT in the inaugural year of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology. For “Making Dollars”, Wheelock presents her animation and sculpture series entitled How to Win Friends and Influence People (2010-12). The series takes its name from the seminal people-skills book by Dale Carnegie, which was first published in 1937 and remains a classic in organizational behavior and management classes today. Taking inspiration from Carnegie’s texts, Wheelock created a hand-drawn animation in which she (playing herself) takes the author as her mentor. With Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions (2010-11), Wheelock and Catherine McMahon (PhD Candidate, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art, MIT) collaborated on a series of photographs that are named after chapters in the eponymous biography. An extended conversation between the artists can be found here. These works will be exhibited together for the first time in "Making Dollars". “...doing a piece about a self-help book seemed like an opportunity to me. It gave me a clear antagonist to struggle against.”

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The images above are of works in progress by multimedia artist Ian Jeffrey. Untitled (Go Forth Versions) will feature four drawings based on the Levi's advertisements of the same name--which takes its name from a poem by Walt Whitman. The ink drawings are based on lo fi photographs of the ads, which are then framed in hand-sewn Mylar sheet protectors, also pictured above. Untitled (Go Forth Versions) delve into issues of authorship, since many of the words and themes in the advertisements are appropriations of deceased artists' works. In the artist's own words, these new works "are about how money enters into authorship."

Jeffrey currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work can be found here.

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Pictured above is a detail of a work in progress by Jamie Horgan, which is one of four works he will exhibit in "Making Dollars". Horgan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Boston. His work often takes months or years to complete, which is the case with this yet-untitled piece. Stacks of seemingly endless bills will encompass this large-scale drawing, conjuring up memories of Scrooge McDuck's vault up-close and cityscapes when viewed at a distance.

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Yassy Goldie is a representative for the Golden Jasmine Yeti Dancers (GJYD)--a pseudonym for artist/s currently working in Somerville, MA, and/or possibly Dubai, UAE or elsewhere. For "Making Dollars", Yassy and GJYD present Digital Identity, which is a video tutorial directed at artists looking to succeed in the art world. In Yassy's own words: "If yuO are struggling to get noticed, get clients, and get paid for u Or artistic expertise and finally want to ramp up u Or artwork so that yuO too can enjoy a preferred lifestyle in 2012, then come now watch and listen to me tell yuO the following information on how to make or improve u Or Power Persona/Digital Identity."

More information can be found here: http://www.goldenjasmineyetidancers.com/

N.B.: The organizers of "Making Dollars" hope to meet several of the Golden Jasmine Yeti Dancers at the reception on June 8.

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pictured above: studio view, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Originally from Los Gatos, California, Alexandra Emmons is painter currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA at Boston University. For "Making Dollars", Emmons is presenting a series of new portraits based on found photographs of industrialists, financiers, and anonymous men in suits.

More of her paintings can be found here

While Emmons works mainly with watercolors and charcoal, she also occasionally works with video and costuming. In this series of videos, her friends and family don hobo clown makeup and clothing for screen tests. These "sad clowns" relate to a very specific time and place for Emmons. Having just moved to New York City on the eve of the recession in 2007, she recalls that her and her friends' struggles to hold down jobs, apartments, etc., conjured up the tragic cliche and absurdity of Great Depression era hobo clowns.

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Nick Rodrigues, Business-Card-Shooter, 2008

Nick Rodrigues is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Kinetic sculptures and documentation of performances from his Human Interaction series will be on view in "Making Dollars"--all of which involve new ideas in power networking and self-marketing.

More information on the artist and his work can be found here: http://www.nickrodrigues.com/

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Making Dollars

Inspired by the mission of the Cambridge Innovation Center as an incubator for emerging companies, “Making Dollars” explores the entrepreneurial spirit that artists and startups share. The exhibition pairs artists responding to contemporary business practices through quiet, personal works with those who are using their practices to influence or subvert systems of exchange. Many of the works in this show examine the commodification of art and of the artists themselves, while other works comment on greater economic realities of today. A consideration of how values are defined and negotiated is underscored in “Making Dollars”, while a sense of humor and inherent playfulness links this group of artists together in a multimedia presentation that includes painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

This website will be updated before and throughout the course of the exhibition.