Transaction – Sender and Transaction – Recipient form a diptych created for my first solo exhibition, Tropopause Contemplation, where it opened the show and introduced visitors to the fundamental concept of blockchain technology: the transaction, the transfer of value from one party to another. To give that abstraction physical form, the transfer is enacted rather than depicted. A round shape is cut out of the Sender and attached to the Recipient; what one work gives up, the other holds. The circle reads as a coin or token, and equally as the moon, cryptocurrency culture’s shorthand for a prosperous future. One value, two panels, a single completed transaction.
Transaction Sender is part of the Exclamatory Intermezzo series. The series began during my high school years as a two-dimensional pattern: a rotating exclamation mark turning from information (i) into attention (!), the turn giving the series its name. The early works are colourful, geometric experiments with that pattern. Over the years, I began removing elements from it, and later started weaving hand-cut paper strips through the sheets, opening the flat pattern into layers. With the layers, the series grew quietly symbolic. They stand for past, present, and future, and for my three countries: a barely visible background for my few memories of Poland, which my family left when I was four; a dominant main layer for my formative years in Germany; a woven top layer for my years in Canada, slowly covering the layer beneath.
