Video

Under the Buttonwood Tree,

Patty Meriam, artist

Photography and two channel video

The exhibit title refers to a famous tree in New York City under which a group of 24 men regularly met to buy and sell commodities.  In 1792, they signed the Buttonwood Agreement, which defined a set of trading rules.  The group eventually named themselves the New York Stock Exchange.

Patty Meriam questions if our personal and social values are represented by the money we spend and the systems we support in our daily lives?  This work examines overconsumption and profiteering, and our investment in the future of the environment and society.

Photographs of baled material give close proximity to identifiable waste products and questions how lifestyle and recycling are connected to commodity markets.  Two channel videos of ticker tape indices contrast the expense of daily living against investment profiteering.

The “ticker-tape” shows commodity prices captured on November 22, 2023 and asset manager trading prices on December 16, 2023, from the NYSE.  Price listings for US Military weapons are from Wikipedia, and US living expenses as listed on the web.  The GNH, or Gross National Happiness Index, was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in July 2011.  Meriam’s listing is created based on the GNP standards which measure wealth in terms of safe and comfortable living standards.  The ESG Index is a rating of publicly traded global businesses on their environmental, social, and governance impact (ESG).  Investors use these ratings to theoretically invest responsibility. The investment brokers (on the right column of vert scroll) who assign ESG scores for their client’s review, are themselves traded on the market.  Temperature scores listed in this exhibit are the company’s impact on global temperature rise by 2050 in degrees Celsius.  The statistics for the ESG index were captured in December 2023 from ESGbook.com