As an artist and scholar, I spent a lot of time Consider what the meaning of making art is and argue with friends and colleagues. In this debate, all common rhetoric (art is about beauty, cultural visibility, etc.) is a fusion of overwhelming facts of Maura Brewer’s practice: this art is perhaps more important than anything else.
Los Angeles-based Brewer works primarily in video, creating prose works from public records, finding footage, text messages, drawings and animations. She began working on money laundering in 2018 when she was interested in films by little-known director Jessica Manafort, the daughter of Paul Manafort, a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump, who was convicted in 2019 and pardoned by Trump in 2020.
Brewer’s 2021 work Private Customer Service It shows exactly how money laundering works, profits from criminal activities, is difficult to trace or appears to come from legal sources. Performances and videos follow the artist when she tries to launder money when she tries to buy her own artwork. This leads to Offshore (2024), the video premiered last year at the Breakthrough Exhibition in Brewer in the Canary Test in Los Angeles. Guide to “How to Do” for artists interested in navigating the global financial world, Offshore It is a poignant and painful meditation to create a good connection between global art prices and income inequality, especially when they affect working-class artists. We followed her to locations such as Ugland House, a Cayman building with 18,857 corporate entities, and Geneva Freeport, which boasts billions of dollars in tax-free art. When I visited her studio, she snorkeled, ate hot pot, and “learned how to build an international corporate building to cover my tracks.”
Still from Maura Brewer video Private customer service, 2021.
Courtesy of Maura Brewer
Brewer is currently working on a project with title Leverageit explores the dynamics of debtors, creditors and unpaid. The first chapter of the video project recently unfolded at the timeshare gallery in Los Angeles, is a portrait of prominent investor, art collector and MOMA trustee Daniel Sundheim, telling the story of his art-backed loan. As Brewer explains, we see Sundheim using his art collection as collateral for loans, which he uses to buy more art, which in turn becomes collateral for more loans, and so on. “Brewer has been working as a private investigator full-time for three years as part of the research of these works. However, she intertwined this expertise with humor to highlight the absurdity of financial intrigues and the obvious impact on the artist’s life.
In January, Brewer threw her apartment and most of her belongings to the Eaton Fire. This sudden and devastating loss stressed for her how money and art were unrestricted with actual physical objects. If, as she describes, both art and money are “deoxygenated social structures,” would that make us who are still in desperate need of material things everyday existence?
