Golden Egg

Golden Egg

Golden Egg was first performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, ON, in 2013. I was really struggling with access to art spaces at the time and questioning the role of artists in the big picture art market. A couple years later, the performance was curated by Adriana Disman and the LINK & PIN Performance Art series, 2015, as a site-specific, durational performance for the feminist gallery space, RATS-9, in Montreal, QC.

The performance in Montreal took place over five hours outside Musée D’art contemporain, where  I laboriously pushed a golden egg across the museum’s outdoor, front entrance in order  to call forth issues of manual labour, class differences, and commodity production. Surprisingly the raw egg covered in gold-leaf did not break very easily. I had told Adriana Disman that once the egg broke it would signal the end of the performance. After 4-hours I was becoming more aggressive with the egg because it was so strong. During the performance I took short breaks to talk with the art goers, and I had a few excellent conversations with a number of the museum visitors about the role of artists in the chain of labour within Canadian galleries and museum spaces. Eventually the egg broke when pushed against a cement block.