ÁB: What are the themes and or topics that your art practice explores?

JM: My work engages with themes of value, mortality, and agency, which I approach as an anti-capitalist, through sculpture and installation. Many of my works include altered or defaced coins, synthetically preserved flowers, and, more recently, the form of the civic fountain. Tactility and mutability are significant aspects of sculptural making, which I try to extend towards otherwise intangible or apparently inalterable systems and structures situated within end-stage capitalism.

ÁB: Can you talk about the upcoming exhibition HARBINGER at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and what visitors can expect?

JM: Visitors can expect an installation that feels both indoor and outdoor, private and public, muted yet textural and auditory. Primarily a low-floor installation based around a large concrete structure, it might be equally subtle and monumental. 

ÁB: Can you talk about the symbol of currency and its relationship to exchange or contact?

JM: Each time I use coins in my work I reconsider value from a slightly different angle. HARBINGER will include around two hundred coins made with Artcast Inc., a regional family-run foundry. Cast in bronze using the lost-wax casting method, then electroplated with nickel, copper, or zinc, these coins function as poor counterfeits. They perform value, but in a self-aware and imperfect way. I have used coins in my work for over a decade, but this is the first time that I have really flirted with producing anything like a near-passable copy. Yet these coins intrigue me simultaneously as failures, and as a kind of excess to real coinage – their metallic value and the cost of their production are much greater than that of the real thing. Undermining and mimicking capital’s value at the same time, these tactile works invite an altered understanding of value found in exchange and contact at the social level.

ÁB: What else are you working on right now?

JM: It is going to be a very busy Fall and Winter. I’m preparing for a research project in Chile with Yasmin Nurming-Por, where we will look at copper extraction, trade, and its use in currency. After that, I will be preparing for an exhibition at De La Warr Pavilion in East Sussex UK, and a group exhibition curated by Karen Kraven at Oakville Galleries, both in February.

This exhibition is presented with the support of KWAG's Women for Women's Art. 

The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and Partners In Art for their support.