“Work shirt” is a textile project
I’ve worked on since 2018 as an investigation of labor and gender in the working West.
Bought from a Walmart in Trinidad, CO for $9.68, “Work shirt” unites some of the paradoxes
of labor in the global and US West: the anonymous El Salvadorian garment worker and
multinational corporation; the masculine American labor of the white-shirted cowboy and
traditionally feminine craft of embroidery; the mass-manufacture of a cheap (yet still
handmade!) shirt and subsequent elevation by a white artist as an objet d’art. On a personal
level, it has become a diary of my years since leaving ranching, documenting flora and fauna of the US West from New Mexico to Oregon.
