What’s the Value of a Dollar?

Patrice Renee Washington, Sean Weisgerber, GTA Collective (Kika Thorne, Jane Hutton, Sameer Farooq, Adrian Blackwell), Shellie Zhang, Chester Vincent Toye, TJ Shin

Special Sporobole installation | Kosisochukwu Nnebe

Foreman Gallery at Bishop’s University (Sherbrooke, QC, CAN) January 20 – March 18, 2023

Aceartinc. (Winnipeg, MN, CAN) - Sep 9, 2022 - Oct 14, 2022

The New Gallery (Calgary, AB, CAN) May 27th, 2022 - July 9th, 2022

What is the Value of a Dollar? invites several artists from Canada & the USA 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 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.