FOUNDWEALTH is about seeing the light.  To see it indicates both, the end of a journey, and the beginning of a certain level of hope.  The moment where the light is seen is a moment where space and time are crunched together into a new thing.  It is the split second where choices are made.  I want the installation to be about that moment, where everything could happen.  This moment of decision or indecision looks a lot like our point in time; the crossing of the two millenniums.  It seems as if we are moving into a corridor of weightlessness.  It seems that the EXIT and the ENTRY, the GOOD BYE and WELCOME signs do not have any particular places.  Like astronauts in a tube, we have to look, while lost in the dark, at the light that may come through the cracks, to guide and to inspire us to continue forward, to believe that there is some worth in everything and maybe wealth is not what we thought at first.

Is wealth something that one can find, like a fat wallet on the sidewalk?  How can wealth be lost?  How can it be found and how can it be maintained?  Maybe it happens simply, by fortune, while strolling down by the lake, by the river, or going home late at night.  Maybe it happens by ingenuity.  Perhaps it is a bit of both, luck and skills, patience and audacity.

FOUNDWEALTH is constructed around a few historical moments.  In 1776, the Scottish economist, Adam Smith wrote in his book An inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations about the invisible hand that comes and regulates the economy.  In 1848, John August Sutter, the man who was in the process, through his sawmills, of becoming one of the wealthiest man on the Pacific coast, was ruin by the discovery of gold on his own property.  In 1891, the Pope Leo the 13^th wrote an encyclical letter on the condition of the working classes.  References to the work of Alchemists; the all-purpose curative liquid A.K.A. – Snake Oil; and the Greased Pole where goods where hung during village fairs inform this installation.

FOUNDWEALTH is a poetic reflection and a kind of frontal collision-relationship of the rich and the poor.  It is a bridge made of burning rags and thrown over the abyss where the river called Economy runs furiously.  I want the carpet-cleaning trainee to talk to the capital risk investor.  I want to know if the parents are telling the story of how the good RSSP bear grew so big in their own forest preserve.

FOUNDWEALTH is made up of seven works.  Those works bear reference to the number 7, which has always held a powerful and mystical place in History.  We only have to think of the Seven Seas; the navigable waters of the world; forming that road to treasure and adventure; the Seven Marvels of the World which included the lighthouse in Alexandria; the Seventh Heaven where God and the most exalted angels dwell; the Seven Deadly Sins (among them, Envy); and the Seven Eleven, a place where you can buy a 6-49 ticket.

Daniel Dugas, Shemogue NB February 1999