Garry Neill Kennedy

The Big Five

an installation in the VAC vault gallery

The country’s five largest banks (in terms of assets, deposits and capitalization) are the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto Dominion, the Bank of Montreal, and Scotiabank. Together they account for more than 85% of the banking industry in Canada.

Kennedy, whose work has often explored institutional power and the political implications of colour, has reassigned the colour schemes of the bank’s corporate logos,  shifting them one down the financial ladder. The CIBC logo appears in RBC colours, the RBC in TD colours, TD in Scotiabank colours, etc., thus disrupting the institutions’ corporate identities.