Maura Brewer at Canary Test

Maura Brewer, Offshore (installation views) (2024). Images courtesy of the artist and Canary Test.

Early in Maura Brewer’s 32-minute video Offshore (2024), the artist says that money laundering might be the definitive crime of our era. She is likely right. The constant flitting of capital across borders in search of lower taxes and laxer regulations seems to support her claim. In the simplest terms, money laundering is the process by which money generated from unsavory or illicit means is converted into “cleaner” cash which can then circulate free from the stigma of its illegality. As Brewer explains in the video’s voiceover, the art market has increasingly become the method by which the world’s wealthiest launder their money, using the vagaries of art valuation and the anonymity of the market to grow their wealth. Meanwhile, the artists that produce this value teeter on the edge of a more precarious anonymity. Offshore shows how the individual—both artist and collector—seems to vanish within complex networks of global capital.

Recently on view in her solo show at Canary Test, the video begins with Brewer explaining the project’s conception. Curious about the inner workings of an art market that constantly seemed to slip beyond her grasp, Brewer used $4,000 to enter the market not as an artist, but as a collector. (She received $115,000 in additional grant funding from Creative Capital and the Guggenheim Foundation, which she used to hire a lawyer and set up shell corporations.) The video then documents her journey as she cosplays around the globe as a member of the ultrarich. Brewer does not show us her travels directly—instead, she films a tablet and phone that display photos and videos she took while traveling. Our engagement is thus mediated by an additional layer of digital redundancy, formally paralleling the system of nesting doll shell companies Brewer describes in the voiceover.

The video was projected onto a temporary wall that divided Canary Test into two rooms—viewers could push the wall, swinging it open like a door, to enter the back gallery space. It begins with Brewer traveling to the Canary Islands to set up an offshore LLC, free from the prying eyes of the IRS. Next, she visits Geneva, Switzerland, where she attempts to set up a Swiss bank account before learning that the country’s infamous secretive accounts require minimums of several million dollars, a sum significantly larger than the $4,000 Brewer brought with her —a revealing crack in the façade of Brewer’s project.

While in Switzerland, Brewer also visits the Geneva Freeport, where thousands of paintings making up a significant portion of the Western art historical canon are stored until anonymous collectors flip their investment-art into hard cash. Brewer’s documentation only reaches the Freeport’s lobby, while the art stored below ground remains unseen. Given the enormity of the Freeport’s holdings, the scene is perversely funny—at the Freeport, the artwork cannot be displayed, let alone photographed. In place of direct footage, Brewer fills the gap with cheeky digital animations reminiscent of “how-to” videos, visualizing the process by which dirty money is exchanged for artwork that then sits in freeports gathering both dust and value before being flipped into cleaner cash.

Finally, Brewer travels to Hong Kong, a region that has become a leader in the global art market via fairs such as Art Basel.¹ Brewer’s pursuit of economic transparency ends with her purchase of a drawing by Abigail Raphael Collins from Canary Test itself. Entitled Redaction (2024) and drawn with redaction ink, the drawing is a sly allusion to the very subject of Brewer’s video. The drawing embodies the paradoxical place of the artwork in this regime: It must be made to generate wealth, but its actual contents are insignificant. Notably, Brewer makes a point of not taking possession of the drawing, avoiding taxation and keeping her investment liquid.

Brewer’s performance of relying on the tenuous system of artist grants to enact her foray into money laundering is a clever way to both draw attention to the vast wealth and power gap separating artists from their collectors and also to dematerialize art itself. Freed from the materiality of the art object, Brewer’s performance withholds the very thing that wealthy collectors rely on to launder their wealth. As a performance, Brewer’s art acquisition is a sharp and thoughtful meditation, but its critical edge is blunted by animations and interviews that nudge the video towards something closer to a news report. Interspersed with the footage of Brewer’s travels are conversations with journalists and lawyers who advise her on this global schema—including its legality. These interviews are informative, but they also emphasize the project’s didacticism, tethering the video more to journalism than institutional critique. While the former can explain important contemporary socioeconomic phenomena, as a practice grounded in art, institutional critique has latitude to explore deeper, destabilizing questions about what art is when treated as an investment. Brewer’s tendency towards reportage comes with the cost of evading difficult questions about the work of art itself within this system.

Maura Brewer, Offshore (installation views) (2024). Images courtesy of the artist and Canary Test.

In the second gallery, three drawings made on mirrors that depict the video’s locales invited the viewer to contemplate and appreciate the funhouse hall-of-mirrors that is the international finance system. The drawings were hung on a dry-cleaning rack, free to sway as people walked by. Each one depicts notable features in the locations Brewer visited: the Cayman Islands’ Seven Mile Beach, Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay, and the Swiss Alps. On the Swiss Alps drawing, rows of floating rectangles, which also appear in one of the video’s animations, seem to resemble the storage lockers of the Geneva Freeport or shipping containers, actualizing the abstractions of the global economy (Frozen [Mont Blanc], 2024). Looping video clips of each location were projected onto its corresponding mirror-drawing: The light beams of several projectors crisscrossed through the gallery and onto the mirrored surfaces, resulting in a bewildering tangle of imagery that was so densely layered as to be almost illegible.

This illegibility was productive, though. As they stared at a distorted and blurred reflection of themselves in the drawings, the viewer was asked to consider the disappearance of the individual within a complex network of global capital. The layered representations of the sites Brewer visited seemed to emphasize their global importance while simultaneously acknowledging that no single locale will provide the final, complete truth about a financial network that thrives on its fluidity between states. In these drawings, Brewer offers us something that lawyers and journalists cannot. The works are not an explanation of the whole system but an embodied experience of its particularities—the dizzying ping-ponging of capital shrunk down to the scale of Canary Test’s back gallery.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 37.

Sampson Ohringer is a Los Angeles-based writer, originally from Chicago. His research interests focus on global shipping and logistics networks as they intersect with other disciplines.

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