No Repeat Workday
Ministry of Casual Living Window Gallery, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2018.
No Repeat Workday is 15 minutes and 49 seconds of dash cam footage of the artist during a bad mental health day at work. In this case, work meant driving in the company truck to a job site. The video is narrated by the artist’s habitual, compulsive scanning of the FM radio.
This work is about the inner world of an average person, in this instance a day labourer/carpenter/artist, struggling under his anxieties and existential battles, trapped within the narratives, roles, and demands of the mundane world. It is partially about mental health in this day of intense self-scrutiny, and specifically about one artist who is wrestling with his sense of identity, insecure about his prospects in the world, and squirming beneath the requirements and the sacrifices that society demands. Making the video itself was an attempt at compromise: art-making whilst on the clock; one of many attempts the artist has made during his working life to honour his art practice while supporting himself and his family by earning a wage.
No Repeat Workday, installed with Narcissus Mirror, at the Ministry of Casual Living Window Gallery, spring 2018.
