PROJECT / 02
THIS I$ AMERIKA
OBJECTS · IMAGE
Completed · 2024-2025
EVERY PROMISE HAS A PRICE.
This i$ Amerika is a five-work investigation into the symbols, promises and contradictions through which America constructs—and exports—its image. Across mixed-media objects and wall sculptures, familiar signs are fragmented and recombined, exposing the tensions between aspiration and commerce, identity and spectacle, power and vulnerability.
America, reconstructed.
This i$ Amerika does not attempt to portray the United States as a geographical place. It approaches America as a cultural construction: an image circulated globally through currency, political mythology, popular culture and the promise of individual success.
The dollar sign embedded in the project’s title is both symbol and interruption. It transforms language into value, suggesting a society in which identity, ambition and even dissent can become products. Familiar visual codes initially offer recognition, but their apparent stability begins to fracture as they are displaced, reconstructed and placed into conflict with one another.
Developed between 2024 and 2025, the project consists of five interconnected works: The Color of Money, Th1s i$ Amerika, Thi2 i$ Amerika, $luto! and $k8. Each examines a different facet of the same cultural fiction while retaining its own material and conceptual identity.
Together, the works form an open-ended portrait of a country and the image it projects: seductive and unsettling, monumental and fragile, full of possibility yet inseparable from the systems that assign that possibility a price.
