LIQUID ASSETS, 2021

Medium: Neon, wires, transformer.

Scale: 14" x 28" x 2"

The neon textbased work LIQUID ASSETS is aligned with the critical text works in the Capitalism in the Public Realm project that Senstad established in 2014 with the monumental text work Gold Guides Me commissioned for The Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale. The text work examines the process of societal descension and erosion of ethics through the liquidation of human value and the autonomous citizen, liquidation of natural resources and loss of ecological sustainability, societal infrastructure, and reduction of the human spirit to currency.

With the Neon text sculpture, LIQUID ASSETS, Senstad plays with the language of finance and the stock market system, and transforms the term for tradable commodities and assests into a snappy pop culture term by humorizing the underlying serious philosphical and social-political questions implied. The term representing the action of commerce itself seeking a prosperous outcome for one, is transformed into a consumerist signage of commodification of ideas manifested into bright light as neon sign in helvetica letters - itself being sold. In utilizing the commercial and consumerist mass production materials, remenisant of Las Vegas gambling culture and advertising/sales signage aesthetics, Senstad suggests that in an era of greed and spiritual crisis, everything and anything is for sale, to be speculated in and considered ready to be commoditized and fast; an unbearable bubble of speculation, void of a global sustainable future.

- Money Never Sleeps

Walls street 2

"The Western man has at last been reduced to a gram of currency"

Michelle Houellebecq, The Elemental Particles

©annekatrinesenstad2018