SECURE-TIES, SECURI-TIES, SECURITIES, Diptych (Blue + Red), 2021

Medium: Dye Sublimation on Aluminum

Size: 60" x 48"

Edition of 3

The textbased work SECURE-TIES, SECURI-TIES, SECURITIES, 2021 derives from Senstad's ongoing critical research project Capitalism in the Public Realm that she began in 2014 with the monumental text work Gold Guides Me, examining ethical concerns, social political and philosophical inquiries, justice, greed and investigation of value systems.

The text statement as a play on words and deconstruction of meaning, mirrors the neon text installation SECURITIES, playing with finance lingo and the advertising of commerce. The suggested implications of red and blue reference corporate aesthetics and political power, advertisement and propaganda, corporate identity and corproate logos such as Bank of America. Red and Blue being a colors of power and state, are also colors of capitalist critique and denouncement of it's heritage (red). The ironic usage of red and blue with its serious undertones, reflects Senstad's ongoing examinations on ethics, societal sustainability and humanism, capitalism and greed, patriarchy and imperialism. The visual provocativity in the sensorially overstimulating bright color dialogue in bold Helvetica merged with corporate aesthetics, provides a vehicle for reflection on the power of language, ownership and oppression - simultanously beautifully subtle and emotively loud in it's dialogue between red and blue. In dividing the word Securities into two versions: Secure Ties and Securi Ties, implies the dark sides of power. The bond of power over the individual, and power of money over humanity, our future and the globe - and ultimately questions the reality of freedom.

The art work questions the health and future of contemporary social politcal structures and ownership, the power of money, the erosion of sustainability and infrastructure, hyper-capitalism and it's methods of corporatization of political ideologies, land, deregulation and the populus of sovereign nations. In utilizing materials such as neon that represents commerce, consumerism, commodification, seduction, culture economy, harvesting of the public realm, the art work references Walter Benjamin's ideas on Fordism i.e mass production, standardized generic production and evolution of mass consumerism established with the 20th century industrialized world. Senstad ephasizes here the paradox of polarized systems and the place of the individual citizen within the struggle between economies and technologies, public and private ownership of data, autonomy, balance and health, seeking to activate processes of critical thought and response within the individual citizen. Everything is for sale.

- The Spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of commodity.

Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle, 1967

- Money is that materially existing concept, the unitary form or the possibility of all objects of need. By elevating need and work to this level of generality, a vast system of common interest and mutual dependence is formed among great people, a self-propelling life of the dead, which moves hither and thither, blind and elemental, and, like a wild animal, it stands in constant need of being tamed and kept under control.

Hegel, The Jena lectures 1802-03

- Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever extisted.

Walter Benjamin

©annekatrinesenstad2018