sarah bricke
1632 / PST

is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher working along the intersections of gender, sexuality, critical theory, and notions of the archive. her process and projects are distilled from the ways in which seemingly disparate landscapes, bodies, and processes are both distinct and inextricably linked, and how these paradoxical relationships are represented, perceived, and preserved through institutional and archival practices.

working through photographic processes, performative lecture, nonlinear narrative, and poetry, she engages in the production of objects and images as a mechanism to facilitate
dialogues around them. she is involved with making as a continual process in which things don’t become fully defined and can’t be considered completely understood or fully realized. bricke’s  work frequently utilizes fragmentary pieces or remains that can be taken apart and reconstructed, transferred into different forms, or become part of new cycles. 

ongoing artistic and research interests concern art that arises in the ruins of the built environment, artistic practitioners who create long-term and/or large-scale work without receiving recognition or institutional support, and those who make work in the face of oppression, disempowerment, or victimization. 

it will be difficult to distinguish the presentation of the work from the work itself.

the work deliberately engages the dissolution of such boundaries.

how is the documentation of the work encountered by the observer?

the work is the presentation of the work - its/it’s representation and replication via this platform.

01 working conditions
working conditions is a transmedia exploration of labor, its structures, and its lived realities, conceived as an evolving series of investigations into the systems that shape our experiences of work. Positioned at the intersection of art and labor, the project critiques the pervasive, often oppressive mechanisms that define modern working life while seeking moments of liberation, joy, and possibility within these confines. Each volume operates as both a self-contained inquiry and a piece of the broader conversation, engaging collaborators and audiences through diverse media forms, including performance, publications, and durational experiments.

working conditions operates through the tension between systemic control and individual agency. It interrogates labor across its many domains—academic precarity, historical exploitations, contemporary gig economies, and the unyielding demands of late-stage capitalism (and neofeudalism). These volumes unearth the patterns and myths underpinning labor, such as the promises of meritocracy, the allure of gilded opportunity, and the systemic inequities concealed within illusions of progress and fairness.

Through the construct of the “castle,” which recurs as both a metaphorical and literal symbol of feudal hierarchies, the project critiques the enduring power structures that replicate themselves across time. From the adjunct commuter’s circuitous toil to the fleeting spaces of potential in fairs and art markets, the works reveal the intersections of labor, class, and cultural production.


Among its core questions, working conditions asks:

Under what set of conditions (if any) is it possible to experience joy and take pleasure in work?
Are there ways to disengage from an oppressive system at some level, even while inextricably mired in it?
What liberatory potentials still exist?
What constitutes the current condition of work ?

vol.1:  Fairytales for the Serfdom of the Neofeudal Regime

The imagery of the castle recurs as an ever-present: modern structures such as Hearst Castle and Mar-a-Lago, and in the gold-drenched interiors of late-imperial aesthetics. These palaces do not disguise their affiliations. They are not ironic. They are sincere assertions of monarchic nostalgia—the Louis XIV trappings of Trump properties, the neo-imperial imaginations of Putin’s Russia, the enduring romance of white monarchies in Britain and Spain. The image of the castle persists because the figure of the king has never left but only been renamed.

Neofeudalism refers to the theory of the contemporary reemergence of the governance and economic structures that were present historically under feudalist societies. Such structures include inequalities in terms of the rights and  legal protections afforded to common people, dominance of societies and governments by a small number of extremely powerful elites, lack of social mobility, and relations of lordship and serfdom between these elites and the rest of the people, in which the elites are quite wealthy, and the commons are quite poor. 

The castle continues to loom over the landscape as both architectural conceit and conceptual scaffolding.

working conditions interrogates labor and artistic precarity through the symbolic infrastructure of the medieval, suggesting a more global and visually encoded critique. The castle, as a reactionary trope, is no longer (if it ever was) metaphoric—it is manifest. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, we observe the softening of resistance to monarchic imaginaries not simply as a cultural affectation, but as a symptom of a reorganized labor economy.

This cycle is not new. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, feudal collapse came not from reform but from internal contradiction: the warlords grew too powerful, and the king too weak. Mercenary armies, once employed to fight religious wars, returned home without employment. Their extraction from the commons—through tax, violence, and legal enclosure—resulted in widespread pauperization and, eventually, peasant revolt. From these fractures emerged the labor guilds, and from the guilds, the artists—not yet autonomous, but specialized.





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3912—21/45  quis custodiet ipsos custodes