Stand and Deliver: Stacey Cann and the Art of Labour

By: Brittany Gergel, Curatorial Coordinator.

Image: Scrub, by Stacey Cann. 

A figure in a red, polka-dotted dress emerges from the wings of The Works Art & Design Festival’s Capital Plaza. She carries a mop bucket and tucks a duster against the small of her back. Her heeled loafers tap delicately against the tiled ground. A pause. The figure falls to her knees. She removes a sponge from her bucket and scrubs the well-traversed tile before her. Without fanfare, Deliver has begun.

Stacey Cann’s durational performance explores the gendered expectations of labour. Through publicly enacting the gestures of domestic labour⁠—coordinating tasks, organizing and cleaning up after⁠—Cann bears and amplifies the weight of these gestures. Her body tenses with each scrubbing and dusting motion. Sweat beads on her brow, no doubt exacerbated by her gendered polyester garb. She is all at once exaggeratedly deliberate and skillfully subtle.

In the tradition of the performance of domestic labour (Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintainance Art comes to mind), a compelling aspect of Deliver is the artistic treatment Cann gives the unfairly prescribed yet necessary. Cann’s labour-come-art is both hyper-visible and invisible. Her dress and loafers are a legible caricature of the mid-century American housewife, transplanted into a 2019 public. More telling, however, is how easily Cann and her aestheticized labour blend into her environment. The tidying, clearing and washing enacted by Cann are absurdly ordinary, and subsumed by the action of the Downtown festival. Besides the adjacent display of a handwritten chore chart and a tongue-in-cheek sign reading ‘men at work,’ the gestures associated with Deliver are easily naturalized as “just someone cleaning up”⁠—a terrifying appraisal that wherever you are, a woman in uniform is likely tidying up after those around her.

Please pay Stacey Cann and the labouring women around you diligence for what they deliver. And make sure your Food Street refuse ends up in a trash can.

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About the author: Brittany Gergel is currently completing a BA Honours in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta. She participated in the Faculty of Art & Design’s 2018 collaboration project “Anthropocities,” publishing art interpretation in the project’s peer-reviewed catalogue and for display at the IPCC’s Cities and Climate Change Conference. She received the Faculty’s Margret Andrekson Scholarship in Art History in 2018 for superior academic achievement. In 2019, she completed an honours thesis, “Obstetrical Authority in an Atlas with Flaps.” Her areas of focus are Anthropocene ethics and the history of medicine as they intersect with visual and material culture.