Forever in Your Debt is now on view at MASS MoCA.
The exhibition has been extended through July 2024. Learn more here.
Forever in Your Debt, my current project, is a material data visualization of the average individual student debt burden in the United States — approximately $37,000. The bowls represent the physical volume of this sum, based on the premise that a pint of mixed change equals approximately $40. As a durational installation, the bowls gradually accumulate visitors’ contributions of coin. Those who offer enough coins to fill a bowl will receive one of the vessels from the installation when exhibition of the work is complete, after a period of several years.
Beg, Borrow, Steal | Twenty years ago this spring, I graduated from college with a student loan debt of approximately $35,000. I took a job teaching English in Japan, where my annual salary totaled roughly $26,000 per year, depending on fluctuations in the exchange rate. Determined to eliminate my educational debt as quickly as possible, I sent monthly remittances equaling nearly fifty percent of my pay back to the US to be applied towards my loans during the three years I spent teaching there. That monthly remitted sum of $960 corresponds to the number of bills utilized in this work.
Had I been able to invest a single installment of these payments in 1999, an original $960 would, hypothetically, have totaled $2,638 at the end of 2019 based on average S&P rates of return, reflecting twenty years of growth. If average annual returns hold for the next twenty years, that same investment would ultimately have grown to $9,706 over the course of my professional life. This sum is, therefore, the price of this work. Should it sell, the buyer will have the option to remit payment all at once or in installments over the next twenty years. Should it not sell, I will dismantle the work once this time has elapsed in order to render the currency viable again.
Curing Time | This large-scale installation of pickled local produce is presented alongside a series of clay tablets recording selected minutiae of the corresponding labor, highlighting the numerous, unseen tasks and efforts embedded in that which we consume.
The tablets tally hours spent in the kitchen, conversations & interactions with farmers, dishes washed, collaborators & contributing farms, and total errands run in the course of the project.
A limited number of prints of this work are currently available here.
“I didn’t know it could be like this.” — S. Bozzutto
Kitchen Bakery | For a period of two years, I opened my kitchen in Providence, Rhode Island, on alternating Sundays to serve baked goods along with coffee and homemade chai. This endeavor arose from needs both financial and emotional, and its returns were immense and presented in forms I could scarcely have imagined. An initial email announcement sent to about twenty friends eventually became a mailing list of about a hundred and fifty, solely by word of mouth. I later realized that in seeking an antidote to precarity, a reprieve from my solitary studio practice, and an outlet for my love of baking, I had conjured a space for alternatives: an alternative model of exchange, an alternative format for socializing, and an alternative means of fostering community. This space was one not bound by traditional commerce, nor centered upon alcohol, nor restricted to a particular group of friends or institution, as numerous social circles eventually overlapped in my kitchen and likewise, in warmer weather, in my backyard.
Breaking Even is an installation in three parts that together compose a balanced equation of alternate currencies resulting from five months of creative labor. Larger-than-life dominoes, home-canned foods, and porcelain coins represent the work, the energy expended to produce the work, and the funds invested in the work, respectively. Through these three currencies, I offer a means of comparison to invite consideration of what constitutes value and exchange in artwork and artistic production.
Mischief in the Boneyard is an interactive set of slipcast porcelain dominoes. Bearing imagery corresponding to the adage, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” the dominoes prompt consideration of the nature of causality and the tension between impermanence and value, specifically by confronting the relationship between an experience, the labor necessary to generate it, and what must be sacrificed to enable it.
300 pints (or an approximation of the energy invested in the installation) The jars of home-canned local produce, corresponding in volume to sustaining rations for me during the exhibition’s production period, were labeled and numbered as an edition and offered up for purchase or barter.
9200 dollars (or the funds invested in the installation) The jars of water serve as an invitation for visitor participation, simultaneously activating the work and erasing the investment symbolized therein.
V_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Day | This durational project and performance was created in response to the continued celebration of Victory Day in Rhode Island. Presented at the RISD Museum in tandem with the exhibition Former Glory and concurrent with the holiday, the work references the story of Sadako Sasaki, a child survivor of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima whose endeavor to fold a thousand cranes while hospitalized with leukemia resulting from the radiation has become legendary.