Moree Plains Gallery’s latest exhibition will explore ideas around money, economic systems, perceived value and the aesthetics of currency, at a time when money is becoming increasingly abstract.
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Creative Accounting, which opens at Moree Plains Gallery on Friday, October 20, features historical objects alongside contemporary art to create a fascinating look into our economic system to reveal money’s enigmatic side.
Archival objects and historical loans will be exhibited alongside recent and newly commissioned work by a selection of Australian and international artists such as Fiona Hall, Andrew Hurle, Kenzee Patterson, Melanie Gilligan, Daniel McKewen, Ryan Presley and Penelope Cain.
Creative Accounting will unlock a range of intriguing archival objects from the Westpac Group Archives and Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), as well as often underappreciated artefacts and cultural material held in regional and private collections across Australia.
The exhibition includes a collection of adding machines – first invented in 1642 and in widespread use from 1885.
These machines are a reminder of the evolution of currency from the analogue to the digital era, with the possibility that in the future all money will be entirely virtual.
The exhibition explores our personal relationship with money through objects such as convict love tokens. Made from defaced copper coins, convicts engraved enduring messages of love and remembrance for their families before being transported to Australia. These coins illustrate the value of human connection over material wealth.
Complementing the archival and historical material, Creative Accounting will include work by contemporary Australian and international artists.
David Shapiro’s painstaking rendered scrolls form a kind of self-portrait through his financial transactions across a year while Kenzee Patterson’s One USD can be read on multiple levels – ideas of value, with the metals used in the coins that form the work being worth more than the face value of the currency they depict – or a more anthropomorphic relationship, with the installation of a ‘rod’ of placed at phallus height — bringing to mind the links between male ego, power and money. Financial design and structures will be explored through a series of works by Andrew Hurle which explore both monetary design and anti-counterfeit devices as well new works which explore financial structures and the banking sector.
Creative Accounting promises to be a thought-provoking exhibition which elicits curiosity and re-appraisal of an intrinsic component of contemporary living, through the combination of art and artefact.
Creative Accounting is curated by Holly Williams, in conjunction with Hawkesbury Regional Gallery and is touring to six venues in NSW, Victoria and Queensland from 2016 to 2018, courtesy of Museums & Galleries of NSW.
The exhibition will run at Moree Plains Gallery from Friday, October 20 until Saturday, December 2.
Opening hours are 10am to 5pm Monday to Friday and 10am to 1pm Saturdays.
For more information call the gallery on 6757 3320 or email moreeplainsgallery.org.au.
