I recently acquired ten sculptures of countries through an art trade with Chicago based artist and collector Ben Foch. Read about his project The World in this Proximity article. In short, Ben made a sculpture of every country and priced them according to their GDP value (1 USD to 1 Billion GDP/PPP). The piece was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in January of 2009. I traded my series of triangle paintings that I showed at Old Gold last November. When I was initially trying to decide which countries I wanted to own, I had no idea what strategy to use. I looked for a continent, but there was not one intact due to previous sales. I considered picking countries that I thought were cool, or had interesting music scenes happening, but Iceland was taken and Sweden and Norway are ugly. I almost chose every country in the southern 30 - 45 latitude region. Instead, I picked countries for formal reasons, their size and shape and sexy curves.

Selection of Ben Foch's The World, 2009
Installation View, my living room.

Pakistan and New Zealand
Chile
Myanmar