Sugar Daddy Capitalism Series

(live performance, videos, drawings / 2019 and 2020)

Sugar Daddy Capitalism was born as a performance art series that unfolds in a

variety of interconnected media. It investigates how the current work culture,

embodied by start-ups and the tech industry, carries a set of characteristics that have a

duplicitous and ultimately destructive nature. The so-called gig economy attracts

workers with the seductive promise of more autonomy and space for self-expression,

more freedom, and less formal, more “human” work relationships. And it does

deliver all that. But those “treats” have a bitter price when combined with rising

inequality: brutal exploitation, alienation, and an ever-eroding sense of social

connectedness and safety. Communities disappear, burnouts proliferate and

relationships become more transactional than ever.

In this series she uses sexual markets and paid emotional labor as a metaphor and

critique to the art world practices and the gig and employment culture in general.

In the video below, we see the pregnant artist holding a 78-year old man in her arms

referencing the body positions of classical pietà sculptures while a rain of powdered sugar

slowly falls from above onto their bodies, coating them in the white sugar dust.

.