Worth your while: TCNJ Art Gallery exhibition explores the concept of value

“Valued added: Artists’ Perspectives on the Meaning of Worth,” on display in TCNJ Art Gallery from March 20 to April 18, is an exhibition of multimedia artworks and installations that explore concepts of worth and valuation.

Words by TCNJ's editorial staff

Melissa Brown’s mixed media print, "Zero Dollar."

Valued added: Artists’ Perspectives on the Meaning of Worth, on display in TCNJ Art Gallery from March 20 to April 18, is an exhibition of multimedia artworks and installations that explore concepts of worth and valuation. The pieces on display here examine differing values that exist within contemporary society—monetary systems, proprietary rights, and status symbols—as well as the transformation of mere signs of worth into metaphors that reference the personal, the political, and the poetic. Indeed, many value systems are determined by structures that are arbitrary and changeable, and as the global economy grows increasingly complex and speculative, currency and other symbols of worth are becoming ever more abstract.

Included in the exhibition are artworks that weigh monetary worth against other values, including the environment, as in Christina Kelly’s Pay Dirt, an ongoing project in which worm-composted currency feeds a garden of plants, and Richard Knox’s Newtown Creek Oil Spill, a penny machine that commemorates the largest and most devastating oil spill on U.S. soil. The value of the American dream is quantified in such works as Esperanza Mayobre’s Legitimate Dust of Santa Esperanza, in which the artist sells “dust” from her own body as a religious devotional tool for accelerating the citizenship of illegal aliens.

Michael Landy’s video of his 2001 performance Breakdown documents the artist’s demolition of all his personal possessions and examines contemporary society’s obsession with consumerism. Katie Creyts explores the concept of self-worth in her sculptural piece Dowry, a wedding dress made from old shopping receipts. Peter Simensky’s project, Neutral Capital Collection, is a mobile gallery containing artworks purchased using currency of his own making, thereby creating a critical intervention in the market-driven art world.

TCNJ Art Gallery, which is located in the Art and Interactive Multimedia Building, is open to the public free of charge. For more information on the exhibit, and for a listing of gallery hours, visit tcnj.edu/artgallery.