Show Your Work is where I document, understand and process daily life through art and writing.

The Backstory

I have been documenting, in one form or another, how I spend my time for almost a decade. It’s not daily or obsessively accurate, but it is a regular practice and cornerstone of my creative life.

In 2017 I was invited to participate in an online exhibition protesting the inauguration of President Trump called 100 days of Resistance. For my day of protest, I documented every single moment I spent that day caring for my infant son using a series of symbols. I posted an updated painting every hour as a I added a line to the painted time card. It unlocked a workflow that I never stopped; there is catharsis in charing your work for the day, especially when that work is unpaid, undervalued and generally goes unseen. Basically - being a parent.

I began to make the paintings bigger, I experimented with format and changed the symbols, the timecards, The timecards then became invoices. The invoices became a new prompt: if I was to send someone an invoice for all this unpaid labor as a new parent that enabled my partner to work overtime on his company, who would I send it to? Him? My son?

I decided it was all the patriarchy’s fault, and so I sketched out a faux-fax cover sheet to Patriarchy with my painted time cards and invoices included.

But who is the Patriarchy? In this case, it was who was benefitting most from my unpaid labor which was essentially the US government. The tacit agreement it seemed was that I was supposed to dutifully care for this child at the expense of my body, my career and my time for five years and then be expected to perform on a level playing field with people in a free market who didn’t have to do that?

A year later I had a huge body of work, paintings that filled the small garden shed my friends built for me as an art studio. The core of the project was always the same: Show your work, even if it’s “just” raising a kid, or caring for someone else, because that work is valuable. And Beautiful. And now I can say, it’s also fleeting.

It creates a simple framework that I can always respond to: What did you do for each hour of your waking day. Sometimes I express this with symbols. Sometimes I use actual words. During the early days of lockdown when I had an infant and a toddler all I could do was post time-lapses of my days being a full-time stay at home mom of two, my hands literally too full to make anything at all, except for video proof of the fact that the day had in fact passed, and somehow I did stuff.