Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert are pleased to present the exhibition Ocularpation: Wall Street by Zefrey Throwell, from January 6-February 11, 2012, featuring photographs, paintings, video, and sculpture. The exhibition centers around a large-scale continuous video projection of Ocularpation: Wall Street, created on August 1, 2011, in which 50 performers directed by Zefrey Throwell, gathered outdoors on Wall Street, stripped down to nothing, and began working in a call for transparency that caught fire and spread across the globe.

The experience and documentation of Ocularpation informs the varied works in the exhibition. A series of paintings, using signature Wall Street blue trader jackets sewn together as the canvas, are collaged with photographs of the performances and oil paint. Fifty sculptures of everyday objects, relating to the Wall Street professions (i.e. broom—janitorial, handcuffs—police, piggybank— banker, etc.), have been coated with a thin veneer of gold enamel, thereby transforming them into precious artworks. Zefrey, who used nudity so powerfully as a symbol of exposure and transparency in the Ocularpation performance and the recent strip poker game I’ll Raise you One… at Art in General, uses gold in this new body of work in reference to the current American financial dream, sold as a glittering jewel, but in fact is a fantasy whose value is speculation.