This body of work sits at the interstices of creation and destruction and references the rise and fall of empires.

 

By focusing on buildings that are in the process of being constructed, this work speaks to the continuous urbanization of cities like Toronto, but also hints at the fall of empires and the physical ruins that remain like those in Rome. The heliocentric bright areas that sparsely punctuate the canvas are intended to reference pre-developed buildings and those that have fallen into decay.

 

The work has further resonance when considering political economy and how the creation of condos perpetuates the debt cycle that we, and many other nations, are caught in as a result of central banking. Since 1973 our government has been performing a form of institutionalized usury by borrowing money at interest from private banks when it can readily create the same money interest free. This practice drives and inflates a wedge between the financial elite (the ‘haves’) and those that are burdened by the continual debt cycle (the ‘have-nots’). What may seem to be a positive sign of economic growth at first is actually more emblematic of a very slow usurious death cycle that, like a cancer, can cripple a society. As long as institutionalized usury occurs through central banking, economic disparity will continue to grow and erode the fabric of environments.

 

The Nobel Prize winning social theorist, political philosopher and economist, Friedrich Hayek, eludes to this in his progressively relevant book The Road to Serfdom that the collectivist approach of interlacing government with economic control will result in the corrosion of liberty and the ascension of Fascist/Socialist dystopias. The philosophical goals of classical nineteenth century liberalism and laissez-faire economics has been expunged at the expense of cartels and what economist Murray Rothbard calls the cartelization of the banking industry. This phenomenon surged over one hundred years ago in the U.S.A., and has become more entrenched globally as we are marched toward a new international economic order.

 

This work intends to question what growth is, and the governmental policies that shape, mold and influence our physical environments and livelihood.