Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Rose Salane
53
Floor 5
Born 1992 in New York, NY
Lives in Queens, NY
Rose Salane uses objects she acquires from individuals, auctions, and online sites to tell stories about New York. Salane coaxes intimate moments out of the city’s bureaucratic systems and historical events. As she has explained: "I acquired 6,400 coins from a New York Metropolitan Transit Authority asset recovery auction. The lot I acquired was listed as ‘slugs’ and contained a variety of tokens that mimic the shape and weight of legal tender. Each of these were used by commuters to pay for bus fares from 2017 to 2019. Five distinct categories of slug coins kept appearing across the contents I acquired. Chance: arcade and casino tokens. Faith: religious keepsakes and prayer tokens. Blank: batteries, washers and hardware. Imitation: plastic play money and counterfeit coins. Place: destinations, commemorations and tokens for access. I am interested in how this set reflects a sample of the beliefs, experiences and movements pertaining to masses of people who exist in a city.”
64,000 Attempts at Circulation, 2022
Rose Salane, 64,000 Attempts at Circulation, 2022. Slugs (counterfeit currency used to trick coin-operated devices) acquired from a New York City MTA asset recovery auction installed on patinaed steel tables with screen prints on archival paper. Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Photograph by Sandenwolff
-
0:00
Rose Salane, 64,000 Attempts at Circulation
0:00
Rose Salane: All of these coins that had been sorted through the system that are not money at all, but they were used at one point to pay for bus fare.
Narrator: Artist Rose Salane purchased a collection of fake money used by riders on the MTA at an auction, and thus began the idea behind this installation. Salane has an art degree, but she also earned a master’s in urban planning. Her work combines her interest in making art with her curiosity about the city and how it functions.
Rose Salane: It was almost this sampling of a two-year period of people dropping whatever resembled money into this machine or into a transportation system that they would get somewhere, physically get somewhere.
The attempts at kind of cheating the system, but also like needing it as well to just live one’s life through the city. So I do find that objects are really revealing of these moments that, I don’t know, kind of fighting and also getting away with something.
I use the city as a very powerful lens. And I try to see: what are the changes that have significantly reshaped people’s way of moving through an environment, this one. And sometimes I think New York can reveal very unfortunate truths. So I’m interested, as a New Yorker, in knowing the vibe or rhythm of the city.
I was just really invested in letting the objects speak and having objects hold the truths that it does and in that form it retains a psychology of the object itself.
I’m also really interested in the bureaucracy in how this currency that passed through, but it couldn’t pass through to the main level of the agency cashing it in for something that they can report on, like their taxes or like their earnings, so it gets stopped at a specific level. But the individual is able to pass through up until that level until the institution prevents it.