I AM THE COIN

I AM THE COIN was a year-long installation consisting of thousands of coins mounted directly on one wall of the BMO Project Room in 2010.. Each custom-minted coin is imprinted with a single letter of the alphabet. What at first appears to be a random grid of letters reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be a series of words and sentences uninterrupted by spaces or punctuation marks. The words and sentences combine to tell a story that was written specifically for this project by Toronto writer Derek McCormack. The bottom half of the grid spells out the story, which can be read like a book, from left to right; the top half of the grid is a mirror image of the bottom. The story is all about coins, the installation itself, and the people behind it... This complex tale is narrated by one of the coins on the wall, a slightly mischievous coin with a taste for puns, puzzles, cryptic constraints, as well as anecdotes about real people. But be warned, the anecdotes are not necessarily..