The Work Office
The Work Office
office@theworkoffice.com
www.theworkoffice.com
by Katarina Jerinic
www.katarinajerinic.com
and Naomi Miller
naomiller.com
July 3 – 26, 2009
chashama Times Square Gallery
112 West 44th Street
New York, NY
Wednesdays: 4-8p
office@theworkoffice.com
www.theworkoffice.com
by Katarina Jerinic
www.katarinajerinic.com
and Naomi Miller
naomiller.com
July 3 – 26, 2009
chashama Times Square Gallery
112 West 44th Street
New York, NY
Wednesdays: 4-8p
Thursdays: 1-8p
Fridays - Sundays: 12-8p
Payday parties held on July 10, 17 & 24 from 6p to 8p.
What is TWO?
The Work Office (TWO) is a multidisciplinary art project disguised as an employment agency. Informed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Great Depression in the 1930s, TWO is a gesture to "make work" for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, and improve life in New York. From a temporary, publicly accessible storefront office, TWO's administrators will hire employees, exhibit work, and distribute Depression-era wages during weekly Payday Parties.
Why TWO?
Why TWO?
TWO was born out of our appreciation for the WPA and recurring comparisons in current news media between that era and today. We are attracted to the idea of creating jobs– "making work" (WPA terminology)–for artists to "make work" (artist terminology). To our contemporary minds it's hard to believe that the federal government would remunerate artists for their work. TWO celebrates such irony and creates a community around it.
Doling out assignments to artists and paying them for their work is an idealized model, perhaps conceivable only in the more optimistic times of the early 20th Century. The WPA and Federal One Projects had their flaws. They became bogged down in bureaucracy, but interesting and important work was produced at the same time. We embrace the disparity between the original program's intentions and its execution. The project's acronym, TWO, is a nod to a second attempt at this ideal.
Katarina Jerinic's mixed media, photography and ephemeral participant-based installations center on invented explorations of urban space. She was a participant in the Bronx Museum's Artist in the Marketplace program and has completed residencies at MacDowell Colony and the Experimental Television Center. She has an MFA from School of Visual Arts in Photography and Related Media (2002) and a BA from American University in American History (1995). Her work has been recently included in exhibitions at Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; the Fox Art Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; the Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, Brooklyn, NY and Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Naomi Miller is a photography-based artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA in English and studio art at Clark University, Worcester, MA in 1996. In 2004 she graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with an MFA in photography. Recent group exhibitions include the Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT; WORKS/San Jose, San Jose, CA; Five Points Arthouse, San Francisco, CA; and Printed Matter, New York, NY. She is a regular contributor of text and images to the Satellite publication (a project of artist Jon Rubin). A blog about her self- designed residency—the Iron Maiden Tour & Residency, in which she visits friends around the country in order to make work—is accessible at http://naomiller.com.
