Pursuit of Gold
2016
Wood, personal photographs (open-pit Amazonian goldmine, gold bars, Tate Britain, Tate & Lyle factories; store-bought refined sugar), El Dorado rum, Certification of Completion from the El Dorado rum distillery in Guyana, Tate & Lyle Demerara sugar from Guyana, Lyle's golden syrup, audio recordings of my mother talking about life on a sugar plantation, Tate & Lyle promo videos on corn syrup and ethanol production, Tate & Lyle dextrose, and books ("The Discovery of the Large, Rich, Beautiful Empire of Guiana" and "Maize for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn"
7’ x 10’ 9” x 8
Pursuit of Gold moves from the sugar my Guyanese family harvested, to the El Dorado rum factory, to the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in London, to Tate & Lyle’s headquarters in Decatur, Illinois (specializing in corn-derived products, located on “El Dorado Ave”) and then back to Guyana, where I stood inside an open-pit gold mine in the Amazon rainforest. Through these linked sites, the work traces the colonial and present-day search for riches, or “El Dorado.” And by drawing connections between gold, sugar, and corn, the work reveals the pervasiveness of colonial and capitalist reach.
