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Concept
"Work" is a sculptural contemplation of where the mind of a worker goes, where my mind goes when I am working. I seek to re-present the scars of industrialization on the human spirit. I take, as my starting point, commodity production. Entering a space the viewer confronts three narrow, impersonal, rectilinear carts with shelving. On the shelves are small "factory produced" representational artifacts. The artifacts resonate with an emotion experienced while engaged in repetitive labor process. The artifacts are "knotted insides." Hog intestines are used as rope, lashed around a removable form to make a cylindrical shape of consecutive knots. Animal intestines are used for their literal translation and a repeated knot for its literal translation, together "knotted insides" are made. A tension between standardization and individuality is created. Re-presented is the production of the commodity form, and the emotions experienced while engaged in commodity production. The objects themselves simultaneously contain the contradictions of the tedium of human labor. They are at once beautiful objects and legible images of disagreeable emotions. It is important for me to demonstrate how the value of an object is the human life that created that object. In the background the barely audible sound of heartbeat mixed with repetitive machine sound is heard and felt. On the wall facing the "work" is a large factory clock with a grill antagonistically covering its face, signaling the relationship between time and production in the society of the commodity. "The irreversible time of production is first and foremost the measure of commodities. The time officially promoted all around the world as the general time of society, since it signifies nothing beyond those special interests which constitute it, it is therefore not general in character, but particular." (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle) The clock, heartbeat, and drone of machine become one, creating a palpable workspace and work pace, a place of tension.
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