I am interested in the tension between universal narrative and individualized lived experience.
My work explores mundane and idiosyncratic details that reflect society. Neoliberal Loops explores neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the economic precarity of the 2008 Recession in the United States. The first day of this art exhibition marks the fifteenth-year anniversary since Occupy Wall Street protesters occupied Zuccotti Park. Additionally, economists say that recessions under capitalism come about every fifteen years. Therefore, this subject matter is timely and deserves our attention.
To explore this topic, my goal is to defamiliarize the familiar through mediations that create room for what Rancière would terms a “rupture.” My goal is that this rupture will open up a discussion. Neoliberal Loops includes music/sound and digital video, photography, stop animation, texts and images on moving LED signs, and letterpressed ink on paper. Whatever medium the idea demands determines the materiality.
I am influenced by personal experience and academic scholarship. We all experienced the recession viscerally in our individual ways. There are also scholars who can shed light and contextualize this period. Visual culture scholar Nicolas Mirzoeff proposed Visuality 1 and 2 based on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of History 1 and History 2. This project takes the concept of rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s concept of revealing and concealing information about an event but expands the concept of text into the realm of visuals and sound. My goal is to mediate the concept of neoliberalism in a way that provides opportunities for new meanings and understandings of neoliberalism. Mirzoeff and film scholar Jill Godmilow critique the limitations and affordances of visual culture. I took what they have theorized and put it into practice to test and challenge their theories.
The Neoliberal Loops project features related works on the theme of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. I reflect on capitalism, feminism, and representation, and grapple with this material in a visceral way. I invite viewers to reflect on neoliberalism, which often seems as natural as the air we breathe, to open up a dialog about how representations of neoliberalism shape our understanding of it and how we might envision other possibilities for living differently.
This art exhibition was also an opportunity to receive guidance from Michigan Technological University’s Math and Music Lab (MML) co-directors Robert Schneider and Michael Maxwell for the Neoliberal Loops soundtrack. Combining math and music was an alternative way to view and viscerally experience the 2008 Recession.
These alternative ways of mediating history I view as avenues to new insights. That is, we view the phenomena, e.g. neoliberalism, in the same ways that results in its normalization. By viewing phenomena differently, it opens up new possibilities for discussions. With scholars Wendy Brown warning that neoliberalism is eclipsing democracy and Hannah Arendt insisting that people must come together in public conversation to affect politics, viewing neoliberalism differently is imperative.
– Emma C. Johnson, 2026
Works referenced:
Arendt, Hannah. “Action.” In The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Two Histories of Capital.” In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47-71.
Godmilow, Jill. Kill the Documentary: A letter to filmmakers, students, and scholars. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2000.
