Not yet titled. This new image is part of a new body of work.
I am interested in the educational system. I am still narrowing down my thoughts about what I am truly interested in showing.
Education in the United States has become a business transaction which in many cases educates students to become educators and creates a never-ending cycle of mass amounts of educators and minimal jobs. This results in adjuncts (and those jobs are now becoming hard to get). Adjuncts are the minimum wage earners of the education world. They have little respect, cannot fully invest in one school (since most of the time they are teaching at 4 or 5 schools) and burn out really easy. Thanks to Obamacare, they can now only teach a maximum amount of classes per school. Now they have to spread themselves even thinner in order to make enough money to survive (which does not include anything for retirement). This is not a sustainable lifestyle. Administration on the other hand continues to increase its' earnings so that depending on what position they hold they can potentially earn close to the high end of six figures.
This is a huge problem and it needs to change.
When someone like myself is forced to work a minimum wage job after obtaining a Master's Degree because of the backwardness of the educational institution there is a problem.
I did not pursue a MFA to work at Starbucks until I am 80 years old. I (among many of my colleagues) am creative, intelligent and resourceful. We should be able to obtain employment in higher education and do what we aim to do: create change, thoughtfulness and a dialogue between students.
The image above of which I have not yet titled is a photograph of my previous body of work with a letter from my current institution transitioning my job from full-time to part-time after only being employed there for just over two years. This is a problem. Not only for me, but for the students who are taking classes in a program with expectations to succeed, and are being hindered because my 40 hours a week availability is now only 25 hours.
I am at the beginning of this work. And there is still so much more I need to think about. Feedback, suggestions or general comments are welcomed.
