Measured Lives
This body of work investigates how economic systems operate as infrastructures of measurement. Through currency, wages, time, and financial data, each project translates abstract economic metrics into material structures. By making these systems physically present, the work examines how value, labor, and well-being are quantified and normalized within contemporary capitalism.
The American Dream, 2022
This project examines value as a social construct and economic metric. Working directly with original one-dollar bills, the currency historically used to define extreme poverty as living on one dollar per day, the work questions how financial standards become instruments for measuring human conditions.
By treating currency as both material and unit of calculation, the project reveals the structural logic through which life, survival, and national identity are translated into measurable economic worth.
Minimum Wage, 2024
This project translates each U.S. state’s hourly minimum wage in 2024 into a precise material equivalence using original one-dollar bills. The exact amount, including cents, is maintained without rounding, turning wage data into physical structure.
By linking state-based income levels to a shared national framework, the work exposes economic inequality as a measurable system embedded within political and territorial divisions.
24 Horas, 31 Minutos, 2018
In 2018, a study determined that a worker in Mexico earning the legal minimum wage would need to work 24 hours and 31 minutes to afford a basic food basket, exceeding even the limits of a full single day.
The project converts this temporal contradiction into measurable form, revealing the structural impossibility embedded within the minimum wage itself. Labor, subsistence, and time are exposed as calculations that exceed the boundaries of lived experience.
A Year of Happiness, 2023
This data-driven kinetic sculpture links personal reflection to the yearly stock fluctuations of the sixteen largest companies in the S&P 500. As financial values shift, the viewer’s reflection becomes unstable, physically conditioned by market performance.
By framing identity within the volatility of economic data, the work questions the assumption that financial growth equates to well-being and reveals the vulnerability of the subject within systems that measure value through market performance.
A Year of Happiness,2023
16 Mirrors, 16 Servo motors, arduinos
60 x 60 x 7.5 cms.