“Scenes From A Chasm” Exhibition

Cuchifritos

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Curated by Gary Charles

Scenes From A Chasm brings together the work of four artists, from across a diverse range of creative practice. The show reflects on shadows cast by global wealth inequality and its impact on society, culture and an ever-shifting workplace.

Developing comprehension of the mechanisms and magnitude of the wealth gap presents a challenge for economists, social scientists and artists alike. The picture becomes more complex when drawing comparisons across nations, regions and generations. The experience of living can be so divergent based on financial standing that it conjures notions of alternate worlds, or times. Thomas Piketty captures this cognitive haze in his economic tome Capital in the Twenty First Century - “Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities”.

These strange worlds and their inhabitants are haunted by ghosts from both the past and possible futures. The conditions and events that brought us to this point of financial-existential separation are not strictly economic; intersecting and inseparable from questions of gender, race, culture, morality and human ingenuity. While we constantly reassess histories, we too are bombarded with predictions of automated futures and super-intelligent machines, effortlessly replacing swathes of a human workforce suddenly free from work, but not from debt. These haunted futures suggest a chasm that could yet yawn and gape, drawing breath from, and into, financial isolation.