Effortless Labor
I Do It Because I Love It borrows its title from the phrase used to justify unpaid, feminized, creative labor performed under the guise of passion: the influencer's caption, the intern's shrug, the artist's excuse for working through the night. Love and labor are made indistinguishable, and the domestic object becomes the site where that confusion is staged. A second irony runs through the material approach: each image prints onto the surface it was made with: a mirrored portrait onto a human-sized mirror, a liked Instagram story of a Scottish landscape onto a glass tabletop, a couch selfie in underwear printed with an eye onto a blanket draped over a sofa. The labor of framing, editing, mirroring folds back into the object until it looks like it was always there "effortless", as if no image had ever been made. Each object was already doing quiet, unpaid work: reflecting, displaying, holding, before the image arrived to make that labor visible, then disappear it again. The installation stages a domestic scene where care, self-exposure, and content production collapse into one seamless gesture performed for its own sake, or so it claims.
