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G2-09 Wall Street
G2-09 Wall Street
2017
Brian Clarke’s Wall Street is a foldable stained glass screen that translates illuminated stock market displays into glass. The work exists in multiple colour variants. Clarke noted in 2018 that the work "was based on the Bloomberg screen of the stock market results." He added, "I used to have it on TV with the sound turned off because I liked the way it looked."
In the 2020 catalogue Brian Clarke: The Art of Light, Paul Greenhalgh writes:
"The charts and lists of the stock exchange have no practical meaning: rather, they are to do with modern alchemy. Finance, the abstract, unknowable power that controls the earth – the force, the invisible spirit – expressed in its own hieroglyphic language." Greenhalgh also notes that, "Wall Street, on the other hand, is in some ways literal. The artist wasn’t trying to say something about Wall Street as a place, so much as thinking about the omnipresence of pattern in the world and the propensity of even the most unexpected imagery to become the ornament of modernity."
This folding screen was produced with an innovative technique that eliminates the lead cames traditionally used to support and join stained glass, allowing the glass to interact freely with light and space. Wall Street exists in an edition of 10 unique variants plus 3 artist’s proofs, published by HENI.