… Morgan Canavan has created an object that resembles a copy of the Financial Times. It lies on the floor, elegant and slightly bent. The object is made of laser-cut stainless steel and is UV-printed. Approaching the object to inspect it more closely, we can read, for example, the weather report, the recent stock market activity, errata, cooking instructions, parts of articles, and advertisements. The artist has reconfigured the texts and images, but the collaging interventions are minor and subtle. The newspaper's claim to be an index of everything in the world today seems untouched, at most a trace.

If we look a little closer still, we notice the differences that distinguish the newspaper object from the work of art: at the creases, the paint has flaked off, and one can see the sheet steel. These places of deviation seem to increase the density of the newspaper object. The sheet-steel newspaper's casual tension and elegance are perhaps what the paper newspaper achieves only in the imagination.

A newspaper's claim to offer information and relevance presupposes knowledge on the part of readers and the work of selection, contextualization, evaluation, and research on the part of newspaper makers. In this sense, there is no such thing as raw information.

… Each '40-foot' shipping container is around the size of a stick of butter, placed on the floor in stacks. Walking up to the sculpture on the floor in a gallery creates something like a bird's eye perspective in the viewer: it's as if we have an omniscient viewpoint of the work. There is the suggestion that the room is a landscape, or the work is in a space with different boundaries than the gallery. Through their size, these sculptures adjust the viewer's own scale, or position their scale, with a different set of terms. Like the sun looking at the earth; rescaling a viewer is significant.

Conceptually, I find the way that it operates is by drawing you back into considering what the scale of an actual shipping container really is. After all, agreements about the dimensions of shipping containers allowed for the scale of globalism to increase in the '60s and '70s.

Some of my sculptures are welded together. Imagine the conductivity of these works as if a tuning fork is struck and set on the surface so that the sound resonates through the entire object. In an artwork, this tone has a capacity to describe the world as much as it describes the object it passes through.

Categories (say, sections in a newspaper) are porous to other parts of the world; for instance, the impression of finance upon nature, or the confusion between lifestyle and art. My specific concern is with the ontological tone this mixing characterizes. My work consists of shifting the mental and physical density of everyday objects by changing the materials they are made from; often, facsimile prints on stainless steel reproducing collaged newspapers.

Recently the world shifted around the work so that innocuous sections in the New York Times like the Corrections or Weather Report are nonetheless political: the adherence to facts, a continuous mapping of the country, or what's in the air today.

I am interested in observable forms incidental to financialization, which I often rearrange by shifting the density of objects. These forms are intentionally suspended out of usefulness, and this re-making is perceivable at reading distance. Meaning is sought through processes of permeability, stress and distortion.