WWKY: Pillow Talk, a performance installation in the ongoing series Work Won’t Kill You reconfigures a concept found in the famous split screen scene dialogue between Doris Day/Rock Hudson in the 1959 screwball comedy Pillow Talk. For this project, Ortiz paid employees to punch the clock, wear uniforms, and engage in structured labor. Workers, clad in pajama-uniforms, sat in bed and interacted anonymously with gallery visitors through text message conversations that were simultaneously projected onto the gallery walls. The piece poses questions about technology and intimacy. What is the use value of social networks in public and private spaces? How can we sort the true self from the persona presented? What is staged and what is real? Is it all merely a simulacrum of reality?  

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UTSA Terminal 136 Gallery

San Antonio, TX

February 2 - 18, 2017