Firstdraft, Sydney, 2016.
Strange Loops takes a speculative approach to understanding the world of finance, economics, and the contemporary experience of late capitalism. McKewen’s practice is presently concerned with researching connections and disparities between the theories and language of financial systems and everyday lived experience. Rather than polemic expressions of economic dissatisfaction, the works in Strange Loops poetically examine the economic conditions and systems that foster hubris, greed, and inequality. At the same time, the work also reflects upon the artist’s own complicit position within these systems.
As part of the exhibition, the work ‘Trickle Down’, expresses the cyclically aspirational and ambivalent experience of contemporary capitalism. A three-channel video animation, the work depicts a US dollar bill falling in a dark void-space. These fragments of negotiable value, evidence of a laborious hand-drawn process, tumble in slow-motion into and out of the video frame, falling towards an unseen ground and an uncertain future.” *
camera: iphone6plus
