That’s Pops’s Money

2018-2019
813 hand-printed letterpress timecards on black paper, black foil stamping, white foil stamping, blue ink, silver ink
4 x 11” each, placed in a grid

As a housewife, my grandmother’s labor remained invisible to her husband and sons for her entire life. To illustrate that, I used the “timecard” format to visually document the devalued travails that my grandmother endured in the home. The twelve wall-panels house 813 timecards—one for each month of the 67 years that she toiled—plus nine cards that announce each decade the installation encompasses. The timecards are created by debossing a monthly timesheet—a custom-created polymer template—into the surface of black paper using blue ink. This technique signifies my grandmother’s invisible “blue collar” labor, while simultaneously creating a physical “impression” of her work into each card. The artwork begins in 1939—the year of my grandparents’ marriage—and ends in August 2006—the date of my grandfather’s death. In further homage to my grandmother’s labor, I hand cut and cranked all 813 cards through a Vandercook printing press.