THE BIG FIVE (2014)

In the mid-1990s, Kennedy began collecting information on the salaries of business people and CEO’s. This research first culminated in Weekly Appointment Review, a self-published artist book which compiles close cropped images of top executives faces taken from the newspaper articles which announced their raises. Then in 1997, Kennedy self-published Figures, an artist book which lists the income of 100 of Canada’s top paid CEOs according to the Toronto Globe and Mail’s Report on Business (April 12, 1997). In this publication, he lists a range of financial figures for each person including basic salaries, bonuses, and stock options. Kennedy also highlights the Globe and Mail’s inclusion of health care worker Carolyn Egan’s salary as a comparison, noting “(1996 earnings: $31,000, a figure which represented one year’s pay for the average Canadian employee), along with Laurent Beaudoin, CEO Bombardier Inc., No.1 at $19.1 million – 627 years pay for the average Canadian employee.” (Figures, 1997) 

Over the years, one of the major themes in Kennedy’s work was workplace hierarchies and financial power imbalances (see Finchwell Revisited). Through his early collecting research, Kennedy realized some of the highest paid executives were the CEO’s of banks and that there was a kind of interchangeability amongst these top jobs. For THE BIG FIVE wall painting installation, Kennedy interprets this interchangeability literally by swapping the logo colours of the top five Schedule 1 domestic banks in Canada: Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD), Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank), Bank of Montreal (BMO), and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). He further points out the extreme financial status of these executives by posting their "figures," or annual wages, below their names in vinyl lettering on the galleries windows.  

THE BIG FIVE was first exhibited at Emerson Gallery (Berlin), July 12-26th, 2014, on the invitation of Russel Radzinski, and soon after Kennedy produced a limited series of serigraph prints with Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver) of each of the five logos. In 2016, a limited edition of 50 coasters was published by Nothing Else Press. Then in 2020, a second version of the installation was exhibited with the Victoria Arts Council (Victoria, BC) on the invitation of Kegan McFadden.