The Daily Grind

In the creation of this piece, I used collage, digital editing of images, acrylic paints, and stencils. It was designed as a response to Kelly Mark's exhibit Stupid Heaven, which revolves around themes of time, repetition, menial low-wage labour, and the concept of "I really should...". "The Daily Grind" likewise engages with the concepts of time and repetition, but differs in that it takes the ideas of industrialization and labour to an extreme, removing nearly all colour, individuality, and spark to represent the effects of 'the daily grind' on both human spirit and the environment.

Industrialization is a major theme of this work, as are the related concepts of capitalism and urbanization. Nearly the entire piece is in grey-scale, emphasizing the darkness and dreariness of the industrial existence, and the concrete structures in the picture are complemented by a smoggy, polluted atmosphere. The buildings themselves loom over both the face in the picture and any viewers of the piece, at a deliberately imposing angle. The architecture of the rightmost building resembles that of a church, alluding to the role of organized religion such as Christianity in perpetuating the subjugation of 'common people' and of women in particular. Both Stupid Heaven and "The Daily Grind" have particular relevance for women, as it is women who perform the most underpaid, unpaid, and menial repetitive work.

Stupid Heaven's emphasis on time is reflected in "The Daily Grind" through the clockwise aging process of the face, and the clock border. Repetition is also seen in the text hair/thoughts streaming from the face, as two phrases are repeated over and over, and the text was made with stencils to ensure uniformity. The text alternates between the phrases "THERE IS NO I" and "AM I THERE YET", thus embodying both repetition and conflict. Furthermore, "THERE IS NO I" illustrates the subversion of identity that can occur in the dehumanizing daily grind of faceless menial labour, particularly for large corporations to which one is not a person, but a number. It is a departure from Kelly Mark's focus on "I really should...", as the character in "The Daily Grind" is largely dissolved of agency and opinion. In contrast to "THERE IS NO I", however, the phrase "AM I THERE YET" does retain a sense of individual identity and perhaps a faint scrap of perseverance and hope, while still reflecting one's weariness and the monotony of one's activities or life course.

The face starts out as that of an infant, then shifts in a clockwise direction into that of a pimply adolescent, then a heavily made-up yuppie, and finally a withered and wrinkled older adult. The only colour in the entire piece is a dash of blackish-crimson blood, trickling as tears from the eye of the wizened old section of the face, casting a troubled and mournful gaze up at the overbearing concrete structures and the bleak, smoggy sky. The infant's eye, on the other hand, is literally hollow and empty: one can see right through the empty socket, there is nothing to behold there but a window to the same industrial world of concrete and pollution that surrounds the person. Over the entire life-course, destroying the vigor of youth and the freshness and beauty of the natural world, the daily grind has made its mark.