Derek Eller Gallery. Chelsea New York
Dominic McGill’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a mixed media work on paper that depicts the current global financial crisis through quotations from ideologues that helped forge neoliberal economic policies, notably Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Henry Paulson. The work takes its title from a book by Charles Mackay from 1841, which describes various economic scams and bubbles in the past that preempt the present western economic system. The composition is dominated by a homunculus-like collaged-figure rendered in the palette of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delightsand conjures the blind and harum-scarum march of history and power. Also on view will be Whatever is conscious wears out, a sculpture based on the 16th/17th century tradition of Vanitas, in which an object or image provokes one to ruminate on the inevitability of death, the resulting inconsequence of earthly possessions, and thus encourages the contemplation of God. McGill adds, “I have extended this to consider the exchange of God for Spectacle and thus our own unsatisfactory end.”
