Basil Kincaid, Get It How You Live, 2019

This poster, featuring Basil Kincaid’s ‘Big Bank Take Little Bank’ (2019) was produced for his 2019 exhibition ‘Get It How You Live’ at Carl Kostyál in London.

The process of making Get it How You Live required destroying Kincaid’s assets – the first money quilt took half the dollars in his bank account; he cut them up like cloth, rendering them useless as tender. But, he said, it was worth the catharsis he found in seizing control over what had been controlling him. “’…chasing money can detach you from some of the people closest to you. I’m thinking about how money leaves that mark. That scar. Now I’m marking back.”

These quilts represent a process of unlearning a deep, American, reverence for money; of attempting to heal the intergenerational trauma of capitalism that would have us believe that we are only as valuable as the cash we can stack. The visceral act of destroying dollars to create something of greater (symbolic and actual) worth is Kincaid’s form of alchemy. It’s an access point to the lineage of alchemists from whom he comes. The irony, perhaps, is that as he unweaves toxic attachment to money over everything from his heart he grows spiritually closer to the ancestors who survived and seeded him.

Year: 2019
Size: 16.5 x 23.4 inches (42.0 x 59.4 cm)
Framed: Sold unframed