As an artist and a former employee of a company that “did events”, Events is both triggering and cathartic, a magic trick that unveils the gnashing teeth of a job that will happily swallow you alive. I used a technique called a contact mono-print to create an image of a paranoid employee, stripped of all markers of self, and at the mercy of a carnivorous boss. The central figure in the mono-print is reaching at an itch they can’t scratch, hungering fruitlessly for a massive strawberry flecked with a suspicious powder (a detail from a monologue in the show). The recurring image of the egg (both in the poem and the print) is drawn directly from the play, and I hope to convey the bodily and psychological paranoia that Events deals out so deftly. At the periphery of the event lurks grief. The office has no room for grieving a lost loved one, or for the daily grief that accompanies the knowledge that you could spend you one precious and beautiful life at the office.

boilerplate, open plan office,

open casket funeral for a divine genius in a blue velvet blazer

funerals are events and events are waste management

disappearances often happen at the peripheries of the event

business casual gala season

resort casual fundraising gala

our busy season turn, turn, turn

this job could be your life,

it could be a fleeting ticker tape parade for

your brief and wonderful time on earth spent at the office

gestate the egg of revolution, hatch it beneath your office chair,

your boss’s, boss’s swivel office chair

incubate the egg of resentment under your business casual acrylic sweater

grief turns the yolks gray-green in the pot