Untitled is a diptych rendered as traces on thin sheets of white beeswax bloom. One panel depicts the portrait of a woman constructed from short lines and dots, reproduced from the reverse of the 2011 Canadian one-hundred-dollar banknote commemorating Canadian medical innovation and the discovery of insulin. The second panel reproduces excerpts from a 2012 statement by Mark Carney, then Governor of the Bank of Canada, responding to the controversy surrounding the redesign of the banknote's scientist figure after concerns were raised about the ethnicity of an earlier representation.
The work examines the relationship between representation, circulated images, and the symbolic authority of the state. Both the portrait and the institutional text derive from a medium designed for mass circulation, where images become vehicles through which national identity and cultural belonging are constructed and contested.
The image and text are inscribed into the delicate surface of beeswax bloom—a thin white film that naturally forms on wax and can be easily disturbed, erased, or altered through touch and fluctuations in temperature. Neither image nor text is permanently fixed. As the surface shifts over time, the traces gradually soften and fade.
The material instability of the work mirrors the instability of the narratives it references. Rather than treating money as a stable instrument of value or representation, the work foregrounds currency as a fragile cultural artifact through which questions of circulation, state power, and visibility are continuously negotiated.