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the bridge clubshift work video |
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Shift Work, a performance art piece by the Bridge Club, is a cultural examination of work, family, gender, and the labor of waiting. Shift Work takes place inside the decaying space of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company’s former administration building— a site that once embodied industrious opportunity, and in its current disrepair, still contains the layered residue of years of both successes and failures. Shift Work’s action incorporates four women sitting silently around a table at afternoon tea. Each slowly sips from a teacup filled with ore dust—the residue left in the Colorado mountains where the coal that fueled the CF&I factory was mined. The ore slowly spills down the dress of each woman, coating the dress fabric in a patina of use that mirrors the residue found literally in the crumbling administration building and metaphorically in the course of a life. This slow enacting of labor and leisure continues until interrupted by the distant sounding of a factory whistle—the women leave, seemingly to be replaced by a second shift. It is unclear whether the women sipping tea are at work themselves, are waiting for a spouse or loved one to return from the day’s work, or a combination thereof. Shift Work thus subtly investigates the contradictory role of work in a family relationship and the role of gender in traditional labor. |
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10 MINUTE VIDEO (NOW PLAYING) |
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