The neon work is aligned with the critical text works in Senstad's ongoing research project, "Capitalism in the Public Realm," which she began in 2015 with a monumental sculpture, Gold Guides Me, commissioned for Triennale Brugge in Belgium. Using public art and architecture as vehicles to explore ideas of power, wealth, market, competition and dependence, Senstad addresses the search for personal liberation and satisfaction in our hyper-capitalist world.

The text examines the processes of descension and erosion of societal ethics through liquidation of human value and loss of ecological sustainability. By seemingly humorizing the underlying serious questions, Senstad plays with the language of finance and transforms the term for tradable commodities and assets into a cultural phrase. The term represents the action of commerce, seeking a prosperous outcome for one. Senstad turns it into a consumerist signage - commodification of ideas manifested in bright light as a neon sign in Helvetica letters – itself to be sold. By utilizing commercial mass production materials, reminiscent of Las Vegas nostalgia and advertising aesthetics, Senstad suggests that in an era of greed and spiritual crisis, everything and anything is for sale, speculated on and ready to be commoditized.


"Money Never Sleeps"
- Wall Street II

"The Western man has at last been reduced to a gram of currency."
- Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles