About
Brochevski (Amai Rawls Jr., b. 2000, United States) makes works entirely from hand-cut U.S. currency. Using X-Acto blades, he slices legal tender into fragments that cannot be reassembled, then rebuilds them by hand into dense, layered compositions. The dollar's narrow palette of green, black, grey and paper cream sets the terms of the work, and every tone has to be constructed from the material itself.
His practice reads currency as both material and metaphor. Rawls treats the dollar as a document of American belief and an archive of national mythology, and he takes it apart to examine what it holds: aspiration, pressure, inheritance and loss. In the George Series, Washington's portrait stands in for the artist and the people in his life, so private experience is rendered in the most public image in the country.
Each work begins from a single drawing and is carried out without revision. A cut can't be undone, so the finished work is a record of irreversible decisions. Rawls has worked in currency since he was sixteen.
He has exhibited across the United States and in Basel, Switzerland, and received a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards gold medal in 2019.
Statement
A banknote is a promise. Its value comes from agreement, not from the paper. I take that promise apart to see what's left.
I work in uncirculated U.S. currency, cut by hand. Each piece starts as one drawing, and after that I can't revise. I can only carry it out. Every fragment was once spendable, and none of it is now. What I'm interested in is where the value goes once the money can't be used: into labour, into time, into memory.