FLAUNT, April 2005

McCarren/Fine: Currency

Having had long individual practices as artists behind them, Barbara McCarren and Jud Fine became a collaborative entity in 1996, working mostly on large public commissions. This exhibition, the first in the United States to focus on studio projects, exemplifies the duo's penchant for loading compelling form with conceptual currency which, in this case, it literally is. They have produced a body of work built around paper monies found around the globe, arranged in combinations that beg questions about relationships between nations and competing cultural identities. Money Mandala, for example, consists of concentric rings of copies of U.S. dollars and Thai baht notes, while NAFTA Mat weaves greenbacks and Mexican peso notes into an indigenous Mexican pattern.