Gallery Talk Notes 09_18_26

Hello and thank you for coming to the art opening of Neoliberal Loops. I’m Emma Johnson and I’ve been working on Neoliberal Loops all year.

I was interested in exploring narratives about neoliberalism and how media, aesthetics, and history shape how we understand the world around us and our place in it.

I will briefly talk about each group of works:

Neoliberal Loops 

Sleeping Jutta

Cherry Blossoms

The Cherry Blossom Cycle

Neoliberal Truisms

Recession Goods

Neoliberal Loops is a soundtrack and a 3-video installation that looks at the stock market crash using music and video. I took stock market data from 2007 through 2009 and created a 16-minute sound piece. The three videos correspond to visuality scholar Mirzoeff’s theories of Visuality 1 and 2 that he writes about in his 2011 book The Right To Look: A counterhistory of visuality. This includes the hegemonic state, neutral media, and media that resists or counters the narrative of the hegemonic state. By looking at things differently and defamiliarizing the familiar, the viewer is invited to re-evaluate the world around them. This project started from joining MTU’s Math and Music Lab working group.

I also recommend coming to the gallery because the last 80 minutes is the remix where I mixed the Neoliberal Loops soundtrack with samples of music from Bach to the present, including pop music and hip hop throughout the years as another way to relate moving through time, including the economic cycles.

Sleeping Jutta is a reaction to filmmaker Sofia Coppola and painter John Kacere’s image of a woman sleeping. Challenging what Laura Mulvey coined as the male gaze, I made a film where the composition is the same except that the woman is confronting the viewer rather than being a passive recipient of the gaze. Postfeminism, which argues that women should capitalize on their bodies to get ahead, tacitly supports neoliberalism, which can place focus on transactions over relationships.

Cherry Blossoms explores the ethereal nature of life. It’s part of historical cycles, visualized through the seasons. I was inspired to explore cherry blossoms because of Sophia Coppola’s use of them in Lost In Translation, where Charlet places paper cherry blossoms in her hotel room to help her adjust to a new space that seems foreign to her, a space she cannot connect with. 

The Cherry Blossom Cycle is a continuation of the cherry blossom theme but paired with French historian Braudel’s idea that history happens in cycles, or durées, which he writes about in his 1949 book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Like Mirzoeff looks at visual messages as conveying information differently, temporal differences also make us think differently about phenomena. 

Neoliberal Truisms are 99 phrases written by me, my poet mother, and ChatGPT. They are inspired by work by Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, and German artist Birgit Brenner’s 2021 LED sign “Stay Rich.” Some people have read them and then after awhile said, “Oh, you’re being sarcastic.” I want the statements to be plausible but not quite right. By making the statements off balance, the viewer is invited to interrogate what is usually overlooked in the background as something normalized. It was exciting to use an LED sign for the first time and use a letterpress for the first time. I enjoyed working at CCCAC.

Recession Goods is a series of drawings of items that economists have identified as indicators that a recession is coming. These objects are a way into understanding a bigger phenomenon such as economic precarity through small stories.

Thank you to everyone who made this show possible and again, you for attending it and helping to make it a success.

“Enjoy” the show!