I am three months into my residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario to develop Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021).
Workers’ Dance casts 8 workers who are 35 or younger; who have had their employment impacted due to the pandemic-induced economic crisis, and who have received government financial assistance to offset or supplement their impacted income. 8 femme or queer identifying POC were cast from a pool of applicants who answered a questionnaire that was circulated online by myself, friends, colleagues, and the museum. The participants are paid for their labour and in the process I had become a small employer.
The artwork consists of two halves, the first is a series of headshot photographs in the style of Jeff Wall’s Young Workers (1978 - 1983), which my project is in reference to and is an homage to. The second-half consists of videos of the participants dancing to the telephone holding music from Canada’s welfare agency that provides funding to workers who have lost employment. The videos are produced by each participant in their own living space and with their own cell phones. I direct the mise-en-scène, provide resources necessary for the video recording, and edit the videos. These videos are finalized with the heads of the participants cropped-off from view, leaving just their headless bodies moving to the service agency’s telephone holding music. The videos are to be placed beneath the headshot photographs of each participant with ample space between the two components.
While Workers’ Dance is produced in the context to the current pandemic-induced economic crisis, I would like the artwork to be relevant beyond any one particular crisis. The artwork offers a picture of young workers in the early 21st-century. The project combines portraits of workers using conventions of socialist photography from the 20th-century, with a 21st-century visualization of workers that are vulnerable and awkward as they dance to a government service agency’s holding music in their own domestic spaces. This music plays as workers wait for subsistence from their applications to social welfare. In the 20th-century, portraits produced of workers in such an empowering manner were meant to re-center the workers and the peasants of the world in recognition of their labour as the creator of value, and to raise class consciousness to the importance of worker-led unions, parties, and of course, revolutionary action. In the early 21st-century, such a culture around workers and the militancy of workers seems to have disappeared. The 21st-century participants in Workers’ Dance dance to the music played by the state which provides a security net for workers. This security net is as much a provider of subsistence as it is also a pacifier for militancy. Marx’s old adage comes to mind: workers are free to work and free to starve. But what if the state steps in?
Jeff Wall, Young Workers (1978-1982)
Alexander Rodchenko, Pioneer Girl, 1930
