Fool's Gold was installed for Upstate Art Weekend at Shadow Walls in 2024.

When I was young, my parents would hang a stocking from my bedroom door and fill it with an assortment of chocolate and candy. Without fail, each year there would be a bag of chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, imitating American currency. I mostly remember JFK half dollars, slightly bigger than their true size. I always found it odd that the company producing the coins had doubled down on the artifice, reproducing an imitation of a coin that is actually silver in appearance. The tradition of giving gold coins was related to the legend of St. Nicholas secretly tossing gold coins into the stockings of three sisters as they slept, which had been hung to dry overnight.

Fool’s Gold is my response to this tradition of which I was a part, extending it to think about value and how it is created. I embossed my own counterfeit American gold coins—pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars—but instead of filling them with chocolate, they are filled with lint. Often when you turn your pockets inside out, this is the last thing you have left. In the United States, the hope is that the next generation will experience greater prosperity than the last, mirroring corporate capitalism’s obsession with infinite growth.