My interest in representations of the income divide led me to seek out bankruptcies of the wealthiest among us. Reading Robert Frank’s book “The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust” led me to the story of the Bixbys, a billionaire couple who, upon their divorce, declared bankruptcy on their super high-end resort the Yellowstone Club in Montana. The auction house that represented the sale of objects from the property included the full 800-odd lots on their website for years (at least during the time I worked on the series), so I set about depicting and deconstructing 100s of them, either as silhouettes layered and layered over each other, two combined objects, or, in many cases, the object itself. The tape-masking and cyanotype process became a way to acknowledge, mourn and breathe a different kind of air into these vaguely charged objects.
