JENNA BLISS, BUCK ELLISON AND JASMINE GREGORY

****Their practices interrogate ideas about class, labour and value in a time of increasing wealth inequality. Born in the mid-1980s in the United States, these artists transitioned into adulthood and working life in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The exhibition takes the pulse of a generation shaped by a broken global economy and examines how financial precarity has challenged myths of fairness, progress and meritocracy.

Bliss, Ellison and Gregory also deliberate on the uneasy relationship between art and money. The vagaries of the art market, art traded as investment and art as a luxury object are all uncomfortable realities which artists have to navigate, and which these artists reflect on in their work. While their practices differ in form – Bliss often works in moving image, Ellison in photography and Gregory in painting and assemblage – all three artists share similar stylistic approaches to satirising, staging or appropriating the real. Their use of representational media does not purport to capture the subject objectively. Rather, in drawing attention to the artifice of representation, they similarly expose the tenets which underpin the American Dream as fictions. ****