The annual office holiday party is a strategic event organized by companies to boost morale and entice staff to socialize. Logic would follow that the happier the staff, the more efficiently they will work. It also offers an eerie experience whereby labor and play collide.

The photographs made of a workplace, void of humans and decorated for the holidays is uncanny. One feels as though they’ve arrived either too late or perhaps even more strangely, in the middle of the event. Wine glasses rest precariously on documents, throwing darts are lodged in the ceiling, heels are abandoned under desks. The oppressive atmosphere becomes disrupted with clues suggesting a raucous event whereby the staff have metaphorically “let their hair down”. Constructed entirely in CGI, the photographs take on an additional meaning. They are metafictions that critique the fictional social, hierarchical dynamics and tedium of work. The office as a postindustrial social space often prioritizes productivity over comfort, resulting in strangely liminal environments. The images created in Bad Work recall a stereotypical banal office. While I’ve never worked in an office similar to the one depicted, the images are inspired by an archetypal understanding of these spaces based on images found in cinema, television and in particular online. The office in Bad Work was constructed and furnished with numerous photorealistic assets downloaded from the internet, forming a collage that together function as a collective, generalized portrait of an office behaving badly at work.