DURHAM Presidential portraits dotted out large-scale in blood. A battered life jacket covered in pennies. Rows of sketched cats reaching for a shadowy fish. A framed $40,000 resort receipt from the bailed out insurance giant AIG.
These are a few of the 57 images on display at Golden Belt's "Bailout Biennial" exhibit, conjured by artists responding to the more than $700 billion in federal money aimed at rescuing battered banks and financial houses.
The images are by turns disturbing and amusing, angry and beautiful. But for those who carved out a piece of their weekend to see the pieces, they offer an unusually immediate artistic response to the world's economic woes.
Stacey Craig, who visited the exhibit Sunday, said she expected to see the crisis portrayed in works such as the portraits of homeless veterans and unemployed workers along one wall.
She found the more abstract takes on global economics, such as a photo of a cow's entrails and a baseball bat encrusted with eyes used in taxidermy, to be just as interesting -- even if the connection to global events seemed more tenuous.
"At a time when we still haven't fully understood it all yet, you get to see how artists are interpreting it," said Craig, a Duke University employee.
The artists, some local and others from as far away as Japan, took jabs at capitalist greed and globalization as well as the current crisis.
The exhibit's setting, a roughly finished 10,000-square-foot room in a renovated tobacco warehouse, seemed to fit its topic. Paintings and sculptures slapped onto plywood, hung from brick walls or strewn across the darkly oiled wood floors seemed to rise from the rubble of another economic disaster -- the fall of the tobacco industry in Durham and throughout the state.
Powerful histories
Co-curators Jeff Waites and elin o'Hara slavick, who spells her first and last names with lower-case letters, have also organized a series of exhibits in a Pittsboro textile mill.
These abandoned workplaces have powerful histories, slavick said. In Pittsboro, she said, workers at the mills smashed looms to ensure they wouldn't be used in Chinese factories.
"These spaces were once hotbeds of economic activity," said slavick, an art professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. "It sets this perfect stage for work that is addressing the failure of capitalism and the seeming decline of it."
This might seem a depressing subject for an exhibit.
But for playwright Victoria Mares-Hershey, crises like the economic downturn are ripe for artistic introspection.
"We need to really look to see how our money and our lives were being made," said Mares-Hershey, who was visiting from Maine. "Art can help us see that in different ways."
The show was put together within months with nearly no money. Artists agreed to ship their own works.
Mares-Hershey and slavick expressed hopes that the hard times might rein in artistic excesses that mirrored the economic boom years, bringing a return to art that leans toward social commentary.
Slavick cited "empty post-pop slacker art," or "meaningless decorative crap that sells for $10 million." Mares-Hershey was a bit more diplomatic.
"This is not the time for painting landscapes," she said. "If you're going to spend the time to do it, you better say something."