Dependency, Gasworks

The Gasworks exhibition, dependency, interrogates how money, power and gender effect individuals through the work of several contemporary artists

The Concept

Money, power, Capitalism, Patriarchy are all very big words. It is sometimes hard to see how these big words have really effect our day to day lives: no one person is upholding the ‘Rule of Patriarchy’, and there is no one making sure everyone does 'Capitalist things' all the time. But it is like trying to make get a refund from certain large companies. You ring their call centre only to be transferred through chains of incompetent departments who all insist that you need to speak to someone else. No one person is refusing you a refund, but the abstract will of “the company” is acting to deny you one. 

This is, we think, what Gasworks means by exploring the ‘lengthening chains of interdependence’ that, according to German sociologist Norbert Elias, ‘bind the micro and macro realms of social life’: abstract concepts and systems of power come to effect one individual person in their micro, individual circumstances. 

The exhibition

Dependency at Gasworks tries to show this in art. Marianne Wex’s series of photographs Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1975–1979), is accompanied by art history cutouts from contemporary magazines, drawing our attention to the pervasive presence and effect of Patriarchy. 

Moyra Davey’s photographs look like etchings of Regency street scenes. They are, however, close-ups of $10 and $100 bills from her Banknotes (1989) series. They highlight the very weird fact that money has pictures of people with on it who, well, have a lot of money. Very odd to think that $10 and $100 bills come with implied role models.

Melanie Gilligan’s series of four short HD videos 4x exchange / abstraction (2014) focus more on the ongoing abstraction of money itself through Internet banking and global markets. By over-stylising her videos with editing techniques found on TV commercials, she makes a satire of the skittish mania that is attached to money, and the similar mania about making it appear.

Philosophy, especially in social questions like this, can seem alien to everyday life. This exhibition will be a useful illustration of why big words are very relevant.