Al final del arco iris

2015 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

Adriana Martínez

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Her work Al final del arcoiris (At the end of the rainbow, 2015) is a bundle of bills from Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, arranged by color to form a tight spiraling rainbow held close with a rubber band. Here, Martinez uses these various currencies to gesture towards questions of capital and value, the accumulation of wealth, and regional economies. Beneath the surface of her playful visual propositions, Martinez asks us to consider not only the monetary costs of international goods, but also the real, human consequences of a global economic culture that privileges some and devastates others.

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Adriana Martínez is obsessed with ideas and entities that extend past national and regional borders. Martinez makes work that wrestles with the global economy through simple gestures conceived with a lightness of hand. Thought of temporally, many of her artworks can be described as quick: easily read, they come across like nimble jabs, the most succinct and articulate rebuttals. Martínez is conceptual in her approach to making art, often writing out her ideas in lieu of the traditional artist sketch. She is not concerned with the traditional skills required to realize her works—those, like the commodities she often works with, are easily traded—but is more interested in the process of imagining and articulating a certain point of view. She works with everyday and readymade objects often, pulling from the mass market and our image-rich global culture to comment on the very proliferation of those images (and the materials and peoples that they stand in for) around the world.

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Colors:

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• money.n.01
• value.n.01
• capitalism.n.01
• economy.n.01
• inequality.n.01
• class_struggle.n.01