DEATH BY CUBICLE

This past Friday the 19th, some of my latest work was presented in the Flux Factory’s inaugural exhibition, Housebroken.

In January of this year, there was a callout for artists to propose installations for Flux Factory’s new home, a retired 8,000 square foot  greeting card factory. In response to this, I found myself considering Flux’s office. While it is the site of many serious and tedious hours spent doing many serious and tedious things (as  offices are wont to be), it is also a co-working office for a community arts organization that is fun, creative, magical, flexible, cute, and sometimes silly. There is no dress code, no timesheets, no 501k, no interoffice memos, no cubicles, no water coolers, no reception desks or laminating machines. There are, on the other hand, the occasional colleague in pajamas, a funny hat, and/or mismatching socks; artists in pajamas, funny suits, and mismatching socks walking by; artists in towels; the occasional feline; the occasional fiasco; irregular hours; ongoing construction projects; ongoing construction debris.

I’d always found this space a little comical, juxtaposing it with the place of my employment from 2007-2009. If that place was bleak and lifeless, Flux’s office is a palm full of confetti in my mind.

While it wasn’t an overt objective at the onset, my goal evolved to make pieces that remind the office’s occupants of what it tragically could be: drab, lifeless, suffocating, inescapable fluorescence, windowless, typical. Invoking memories of my previous office-based jobs and internships, I created an audiopiece/soundscape with my talented friend and music production guru, Jesse Novak. Our collaboration is entitled “This is not working.” I hope you love it. I hope it drives you crazy. I hope it reminds you of 3pm on a Tuesday.

(I hope you ask me to send it to you, because as of right now I can’t upload music on this blog.)

My other piece is a wall drawing in the office, also inspired by my previous experiences in more usual office environments. Specifically, at one particular internship at a progressive women’s health nonprofit in New York’s financial district, I found myself daydreaming surreal fantasies wherein everything foiled reality: suddenly, the flouresent lights flicker out, and in the center of the office drops a glittering disco ball, followed by slowly flashing colored lights and appropriate peppy dance music to crowd out the drone of laboring printers, faxes and copiers; people stand up from their chairs in their cubicles and climb onto their desks and start dancing in place, smiling, waving and pointing towards one another; anyone walking down the hallway with important files now wears roller skates, and important files are now important party drinks and snacks!

I didn’t draw this (maybe I should have), but I did draw a similarly founded fantasy, one wherein an annoying, despair-inducing equipment malfunction meets fantasy land. Concept and executed versions below.

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