DIVERSITY WILL MANAGE US AND RETENTION MEANS HAVING THE BEST TALENT PERFORM TO THE MAXIMUM; MAKE SURE THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THEIR ACTUAL PERFORMANCE DOES NOT DERAIL THIS INDIVIDUAL.
Jessica Vaughn
Jessica Vaughn’s Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful is an examination of life dominated by something greater than the self, a reminder of marginalization, and an intermingling of notions of space, race, and labor.
Born in Chicago 1983, Vaughn is a 2011 Penn MFA graduate and multimedia artist currently living in Brooklyn. Her art focuses on transcending power structures of quotidian labor spaces; she often employs readymade objects relating to her hometown to both question bureaucratic hierarchies and to relate to her own social history.
Vaughn’s exhibition opened in March at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work spans the entirety of the first floor of the Institute and highlights both new works and past creations, all under the theme of “Success” dominating workplace culture and marginalizing the lives of workers in a world where objects and office spaces are mass-produced and depersonalized.
Upon walking into the exhibition, the viewer’s temporal-spatial reality is altered. The floor is lined with plush, red carpeting and the wall bears a television screen that depicts a variety of phrases relating to productivity in the workplace. With Vaughn’s repurposing of employee training videos, we are forced to encounter the ironies and facts of the corporate world: DIVERSITY WILL MANAGE US AND RETENTION MEANS HAVING THE BEST TALENT PERFORM TO THE MAXIMUM; MAKE SURE THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THEIR ACTUAL PERFORMANCE DOES NOT DERAIL THIS INDIVIDUAL. With this color digital video installation playing on a loop, we must reckon with office workers who are rendered marginal in these corporate spaces, as well as with the loss of the self and a more singular “identity” that occurs when a person is considered a cog-in-the-machine rather than a powerful entity in her own right.
How does an office space remove the personal from daily, habitual interactions with others? Vaughn’s drawings in the next gallery space grace the walls and draw inspiration from decommissioned reports from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as source material. Painting Sets 1-4 engages directly with laws, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, created to stop discrimination in the workplace; these drawings depict the government’s shortcomings and lost promises, of the absence of women and people of color from the government’s own work force. Again, Vaughn engages with visual irony to promote stark realities regarding the workplace culture of the United States, of the marginalization of people throughout history within industrial spheres.
Vaughn’s art is so compelling in its diversity of substance and structure. By developing art through multiple mediums, she highlights the diversity of her own discourse, of the nuances ofmarginalization and “success” that alter each working life. She capitalizes on the political and social influences of the workplace by employing mass-produced, discarded materials which force us to take in the objects that we are familiar with seeing each day.
How can a bus seat serve an artistic statement? In South Beach Blue No. 036, Boomer Gray #341, and Dark Blue, Vaughn cuts patterns out of fabric scraps used for public seating on the Chicago Transit Authority to conjure the removed spaces from seats for passengers. The titles of these works originated from the color swatches of the manufacturers from which she collected them. By creating negative spaces, Vaughn forces us to consider those who both rode on this transportation system each day, as well as those who were integral in the mass production of the system in her Chicago hometown.
My favorite work in Vaughn’s exhibition was Irrational Rests, a sculpture created from 103 LED lights, aluminum, and a DMX controller. Referencing the concept of time and the design of our lives around an already man-made system of hours, Vaughn invokes the unit of time by developing this sculpture of a gridded lighting fixture. The work functions on a cycle of 24 hours and yet runs opposite to the sun, shining the brightest not during the day, but in the middle of the night. This work is poignant not only because it references our capitalist culture in which productivity is measured by the amount of hours worked in the artificial lighting of office spaces, but it also references America’s past history, during which companies tracked their workers based on the movement of the sun throughout the day before the standardization of clocks. Through this sculpture, Vaughn calls into question the regimentation of our lives around work and around the concept of productivity rooted into our daily routines by standardizations of time, of the manner in which we regulate our days.
In our current, technologically-masterminded age, Vaughn’s sculptures and paintings are evocative of the Penn atmosphere. They remind us of our competitive culture, of our willingness to “succeed” when success itself might be defined by something that revokes our “humanness” in favor of working and achieving like machines. Who are we, Vaughn seems to ask through her work, if we define our own success and productivity based upon the dealings of an industrialized world?
All of us should consider these implications of a standardized, regimented life in relation to our own happiness. Who are we, in the end, if we are not defined by an office system, by the standardization of our days? It seems, to me, that Vaughn is asking us, through her art, to define our own humanity and to redefine our own version of success, not based upon the values of a system, but rather on our own desires and happiness.
Those interested in learning more about Vaughn and her artistic process do so here.
