twenties

aka South of (a) Grand

Unexhibited, 2024

A collection of old bills collected during bartending shifts, framed numerically representing each year of my 20s

I entered my 20s at the same time the world descended into the Great Recession. In many ways, that new era upended the promise of salaries and college degrees. It was a clashing of old money traditions with the arrival of millennials into the marketplace.

These bills of the old designs are like artifacts of a previous era. They reminded me of being given two dollar bills as gifts by my grandparents growing up. As an anti-counterfeit measure, I’d heard that banks destroyed these old bills when they received them, so I never had it in me to spend any of this old money.

Instead, I kept these bills as they came in, using them to remind me of how the pursuit of money (a job, a career) felt then. Eventually, I settled on framing these bills to make up the ten pieces in this show, representing the each year of the decade that were my twenties.

This collection is dedicated to anyone who spent and earned their 20s working in the service industry.