TRUST: An Installation by Anne Bush
January 11 - April 23, 2002

O‘ahu artist Anne Bush is a graduate of Yale University and chairs the design program at the University of Hawai‘i–Manoa. Her art and design work have been recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the American Center for Design, Eye magazine, Print magazine, and ID magazine. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France, and is currently a visiting professor in the graduate program at the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Dansk Plakatmuseum in Abyhoj, Denmark; the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany; and La Maison du Livre et de L’Affiche in Chaumont, France.

Bush’s current work explores the relationship between language and space. She works in a variety of media and states that her work “challenges the seeming transparency of language (visual and verbal) and posits ways in which an awareness of the subjectivity of language can inform and influence communication practices.” Bush is particularly interested in site-specific work, which requires that artists respond to discrete parameters rather than simply create parameters.

Bush’s installation at First Hawaiian Center will extend these ideas, examining the “curious alliance” between bank and museum with a focus on the material and immaterial aspects of money. The artist hopes that this correlation “provokes thinking about the ways in which exchange-value supercedes use-value in both currency and works of art.” Bush also envisions the installation, which places money in the public realm, as a play on the notion of “trust.”