The Last Penny (2025) is a sculpture installed in July, 2025 on a light pole at the edge, and at the invitation, of an artist-run community garden. The garden, Jardin Papillon, was commissioned by an adjacent condo developer on the busy corner of Meilleur and Chabanel in the rapidly changing Chabanel Garment District of Montreal.
The Last Penny was made by repurposing found satellite dishes with laser-cut plywood and fibreglass and is intended to stay up as long as the garden remains in place at the discretion of the developers. The sculpture depicts the last Canadian penny before it was retired by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2013.
It resurfaces as a token of ambivalence—a cheap icon of patriotism in a refurbished nationalist era; a beacon of longing for an earlier time; an expression of art’s marginal appearance in the everyday economy (my two cents); public art in the form of the only thing that unites us: money.
