2022

video art + poem

Commissioned artwork for Glyphoria’s inaugural issue, Maintenance

Editor, Jay Ritchie, writes of the piece:

“Jessica Bebenek’s videopoem “Reproduction” catalogues while simultaneously performing the tasks necessary for the upkeep of a domestic space. The simultaneity of doing while listing what remains to be done captures the endlessness of this work, a cyclicality that is visualized by the opening and closing shots of the blanket thrown over the made bed: morning to night to morning again. But it is in this quotidian rhythm that the piece finds its meditative moments, homing in on them with frank intimacy: a party dress turned into a diptych by the space between the washer and dryer, a memory sparked by the fading design on a coffee mug, a cat leaping off the bed. Bebenek defamiliarizes the to-do list, letting us hear it as a disembodied, weary imperative spoken both from within and without. Situating excerpts from feminist artists and critics alongside the everyday imagery re-emphasizes the reproductive labour that underwrites intellectual labour, combining theory and praxis in the way that Mierle Laderman Ukeles first manifestoed in 1969. After all, at the end of the day, the dishes and the laundry got done, and now it’s art.