When is work not work? When does it stop hurting us?
It is not just avoiding things we don’t want to do.
I can feel good doing the things I do not like if I find value in them.
A good worker does not stop to rest their limbs and a mind should not stop to drift. That is what we’re taught, not explicitly but through action. When mom asks you why you’re sitting around and you can’t recall the last time she did the same, when perfect attendance is awarded and lofted above our innocent heads, when you can’t remember what your dad looks like in the midafternoon sun, when we have to prove how sick we are to miss lessons, and later when sick days are rationed because progress can't wait.
Dreaming is infantilized in our society and those who indulge in it are failures. Slow, gentle lives are fantasies that only come true after death.
Peace is something to steal between shifts. Green isn’t a color in the hood. Blue collars come with an inhaler. How many painkillers does it take to make a battered body move again?
We don’t want to do work without meaning, we don’t want to do it alone, we don’t want to do it unendingly and mercilessly.
When we find enough value in ourselves to take time for ourselves that’s when we realize these things.
My latest work, "I Need a Minute," asks viewers to examine their relationship with productivity, rest, and the imbalance between them. Rather than giving an answer to the perpetual work-life balance conflict, I urge viewers to just start with examining their routines and simply ask, “Why am I doing this?” In my life that has typically been a point of immense growth, when I finally snap out of mindless routine and muscle memory and start to question what is going on. I struggled a lot with how to bring viewers to this point. There’s probably been about 10 different versions I had come up with, all terribly complicated and didactic.
In the end, I settled with a living room scene; a chair to sit in and a window to look through. The feeling of having a precious moment of time to be nothing and have nothing expected of you. Flanking these are a collage of meditative images, a framed image, and a side table full of readings I’ve annotated covering ideas of disability, productivity, mutual aid, and of course rest. There are also many little objects and writings I made in response that are much more poetic and casual. There’s a lot to look through.