Maura Brewer, Offshore

In 2022, I applied for a Guggenheim fellowship for a project in which I proposed to launder money through art acquisition. I applied on a lark - I assumed that, after 15 years, I was on a slow path to quitting being an artist. I was struggling to balance my art practice and my day job, and I felt tired and alienated. I began to see my studio as a place where I made objects that, best case scenario, would serve as investment vehicles for the ultra wealthy. Somehow, I got the award. 

Since then, I’ve been teaching myself how to launder money through art on an international scale. I conducted interviews with lawyers, dealers, bankers, journalists, financial executives and artists. I traveled to the top four countries on the financial secrecy index: The Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and Switzerland (the US is the 4th country, and I was already there.) I visited Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is home to 18,857 corporate entities, and The Geneva Freeport, which houses billions of dollars in untaxed art. I went snorkeling and ate fondue. I learned how to set up an international corporate architecture to cover my tracks. I researched Swiss banking laws. I meditated on the well-established link between global art prices and income inequality, as well as the declining numbers of working-class artists. I purchased numerous lottery scratchers and won $25.

On March 30th, Offshore opens at the Canary Test. Offshore is the culmination of three years of work. It’s a travelog about art acquisition and money laundering. It’s also a story about tax havens - out of the way places, many with colonial pasts, that have built their economies on providing financial services to the West. Offshore is about money, crime and art, but it’s also about what it means to be a working artist.