APPERTURE: All That Glitters is Fool’s Gold

Description

Lisa Barnard’s new photobook, The Canary and The Hammer, is a whirlwind tour of humanity’s relationship to gold, from the Inca Empire to the California Gold Rush to present-day China, where the precious metal is both harvested out of toxic imported e-waste and studied in experimental medical circles. Through photographs, historical documents, and original texts, Barnard offers a non-linear, visual biography of gold and its exploitative, capitalist history. Of the book’s title, she writes, “Much like the canary taken into the coal mines in the twentieth century, gold is the gauge by which we monitor our economic stability. The hammer is the tool that smashes the structures in which it is embedded.” The project serves as the political artist’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, an exploration of our continued preoccupation with the accumulation of wealth.