MY BRAIN, lately

BUSINESSLADIEZ in the comics

My friend Elizabeth sent this to me recently and it is AMAZING. encompasses everything a BusinessLady aspires to be. sorta.

from Hark! A Vagrant webcomic

1980′s Businesswoman Comics

Let’s Talk about BUSINESS: Shannon Finnegan

MONEY/TIME/VALUE/BUSINESS. BUSINESSLADYTIME(TM)INC.
an ongoing series of interviews and discussions about art and business. how do they balance out? how do we make this stuff real?

Shannon Finnegan

Shannon makes work that explores “working” and jobs and questioning what tasks and actions have value. She has done a series of 8-hour performances, doing a repetitive task for an 8 hour period, clocking in and out and making tick marks to note bathroom breaks as well. We talked about Shannon’s ideal / conceptual daily schedule: she would go into work, do an 8-hour drawing, and then clock out and leave without doing any other drawings in the evening or on her “off time”. Her actual ideal schedule (in real life) would probably include spending a majority of her days doing 8-hour drawings, but would also include time to have meetings with her assistants and interact with the people she’s working with, because she would be working with people to produce projects bigger than just her, and she’d have to set up meetings and future performances and gallery shows.

She talked about how just recently she’s fallen into a schedule which has her realize she could actually balance being an artist and make a living at the same time – working 4 days week and then having 3 days a week to be making artwork. “That third weekend day is crucial.”

But we also talked about how important it is having that consistency. if you have to spend some of your non-working day “hustling” for more work, than that eats into your art time, and more importantly it eats into your head space making you worry about the income and leaving no space for creative making.

This is all of the interview I managed to record.

Shannon currently lives in New York City and is working as a personal assistant, nanny, non-profit arts organization summer festival assistant, and probably more jobs I don’t remember.

Shannon holds a BA from Carleton College.

She will be exhibiting an 8-hour performance at the Invisible Dog Gallery on Saturday June 9th from 11am-7pm with a reception and Q&A from 6pm-8pm.

Follow up things:

READ THIS: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, June 2011

Let’s Talk about BUSINESS: Breanne Trammell

MONEY/TIME/VALUE/BUSINESS. BUSINESSLADYTIME(TM)INC.
an ongoing series of interviews and discussions about art and business. how do they balance out? how do we make this stuff real?

Breanne Trammell

Breanne’s interview was a casual porch-interview, over some quality glasses of water. We talked about her blossoming Nail School project, which is leading towards a Nails Across America tour next summer in a canned-ham trailer re-purposed as a nail salon, trading manicures for stories, art, things, stuff, meeting people and making the world happy through fancy nails. Breanne is currently a lecturer in art + design at SUNY Purchase and adjunct professor in graphic design at Ramapo College in New Jersey, in addition to going to Nail School four nights a week. She holds an MFA from RISD and a BFA from the University of Texas, Arlington.

Breanne talked about how it’s a strange line between her art, business as art, and art as business. she’d love to be able to sustain herself through the future by doing nails. But that requires having people pay traditional fees and she is interested in using barter systems to engage with people in the salon. can that fit into actually having it as a profitable business at the same time? Can the piece be an interactive profitable business AND art piece?

Breanne is currently writing and sending out grant applications to help fund the purchase of the trailer, the tour itself, and other related supplies and design work for the project. She also currently needs 4 new tires on her car, which she drives approximately 500 miles per week to travel to Nail School and to her professor jobs. She recently purchased a portable nail salon table.

Follow up things:

• similar-ish nail salon art piece? hanns eisler nail salon.  not clear on the details.
• similar projects: jen ‘n outlaws fish fry truck and crawfish boil (past wassaic project residents)

#dailyflag

March 3 – April 29, the period of my Wassaic Project Residency.

I created a one-word flag for every day of the residency. The word “created” the day, as opposed to reporting or reflecting on it. It was a way to get out of my head and into the world, to make something instead of think about it, to stop the unproductive negative thinking that kept me from jumping out and making things happen (as opposed to thinking about how stupid or dumb they might turn out).

View the full project set here.

PowerWoman Breakfast

As a semi-culminating event of my Wassaic Project Residency, I hosted a PowerWoman Breakfast. A team of Powerful Women cooked pancakes for the Business Meeting while blasting a montage of business-related music. All in attendance wore a PowerSuit or a piece of the Wassaic Suit Collection, a limited edition series of wearable Business Blazers that combined nostalgia, business, and power into one costume.

All the suits and many of the materials were sourced from 8 Firehouse Road, a house which over the period of my Wassaic stay was going through a period of upheaval and starting over — cleaning out all the materials from it’s diseased resident, who happened to be a very classy small stature man who wore a great suit.

As I was gathering all these suits I realized that they were a bit of a love-letter to Wassaic. They held so many memories of this man I do not know and of the town he lived in. I also have been carrying around many items and pieces of my past filled with memories. I used the excuse that these were “art supplies” as a reason to keep them around. But like the family of 8 Firehouse Road, it was time to throw some shit out.

I combined the found items and my own collections into a series of wearable PowerSuits, imbued with power and nostalgia.

At the PowerWoman Breakfast Business Meeting we discussed power in relation to what we are wearing and how we take on different personae, and the world relates to us differently based on what we are wearing. We touched on topics of class and perceived wealth, and how that relates to how you are received or related to by the world. We talked about wearing make up and “grown up” clothing and how different employers have required different levels of “professionalism” at work. We talked about the differences in what is “business appropriate” for women versus men, and about the difference between wearing a suit and being one of the crowd – wearing what you think you should be wearing – versus wearing a suit and owning that power, and being your own person inside this “costume”. We talked about how we feel more comfortable in different costumes depending on our context, environment, and location.

Everyone spoke and the discussion was so real and vivid, with each person contributing a story or thought from their past. We had the Wassaic Project residents, staff, and local people from Amenia there, and it was lovely.

The pancakes were DELISH as well.

I’m so excited for where this project is going next! I envision multiple performances in multiple locations. One PowerWoman Breakfast in a diner with everyone wearing the same color suits. Another performance in a corporate Manhattan office with many ladies in suits busying around sewing and sorting and doing very important business related tasks. Another performance in a local hand-made tailor shop

Maybe all the performances feature a Corporate Breakfast? Maybe the commonality is just the suits, and the activity of the Meeting changes. Maybe each performance features a different set of suits, made specifically for and with materials sourced from that location.

As a Wassaic conclusion, I was really pleased with how the event turned out. It incorporated so much of what I had done there over my two months, and so much of the materials that I had brought and also found while there. I’m excited to be launching into the next phase of the PowerSuit project! in the city, in far away places, in your house, in mine, left & right, up & down!

STAY TUNED!