Miriam Young is a creative director living in color in Roanoke.

E-mail Miriam and promote your own art at the Culture Vulture message board.

Related

Archives

• Culture Vulture archives

Getting fleeced at the pump while oil companies and their bloated barons rake in obscene profits? Wondering where need ends and greed begins? Have I got some art for you!

Valuing our values

What effect does the value of a dollar have on our personal and ethical values? Ryan Broughman, a visual communications major at Virginia Tech, was intrigued by money's relationship to what we desire, what we consume and our ability (or inability) to know when enough is enough. He has parlayed that exploration into a remarkable and timely body of work that exhibits a high level of thought and craftsmanship.

Money for somethin'

Inspired by both his grandfather's coin collecting and Italian artist Franco Angeloni's use of currency as a medium, Broughman's art begins with high-resolution scans of dollar bills. Now, when it comes to reproducing money, size matters to the U.S. Treasury. Broughman's usage, due to its scale and his manipulation, is legit. Through the use of laser-sharp cuts and patterns, Broughman says his "Pornographic Economics" series of images "spotlights the lurid relationship between the portrayed subject, the viewer and the dollar. Initially I began working strictly analog, using an X-acto knife to carefully cut out forms. Eventually, the desire to go large and make more precise cuts led me to entirely digital methods. By representing an oil company's logo out of the dollar, I am stripping down its corporate identity to represent more directly [its] role in society. Which is more disturbing -- our dependence on oil, or our dependence on money? I'm putting the serpent's tail in its mouth, revealing the cycle."

From the series 'Pornographic Economics,' by Ryan Broughman

What was that about size?

Writing about art cannot always adequately relay the size and scope of an artist's work. Because they're in digital format and worked at such high resolution, the "Oil Dollars" can range in size from 8 or 16 inches up to more than 7 feet, and Broughman believes he can enlarge them to the size of Times Square. Imagine slickly rendered "Oil Dollars" of Shell, Amoco, Texaco and Exxon, conspicuously draped on sides of skyscrapers in downtown Dallas or Houston, or Kuwait City.

A hot ticket

Unlike the carefully controlled market for oil, the digital nature of this series means that supply will probably not outstrip demand. Broughman's work, which has been exhibited in Blacksburg among the hookahs at the She-Sha Cafe, in XYZ Gallery shows and inside Burruss Hall at Virginia Tech, is about to go national. If you're fast enough, you can acquire his work now for a mere pittance, from $150. What delicious irony if the series were mounted in the reception area or lobby of a stock brokerage firm. So, to the up-and-coming artist Ryan Broughman and his professors, Carol Burch-Brown and Eric Standley, this Culture Vulture extends congratulations and predicts a very interesting future for this thought-provoking and visually arresting series of art and its creator.