Courtesy of Piotr Szyhalski
Piotr Szyhalski’s “Labor Camp”
On the morning of March 24, 2020, Piotr Szyhalski woke up from a peculiar dream. In it he visualized a severed head grimacing on the ground with plants growing out of its eyeballs.
The image followed him through his morning cup of coffee, through his reading that President Trump was considering reopening the economy over health experts’ objections, through the news that the senate was nearing a stimulus deal. Then in the late morning when Piotr reached a productivity stalemate, using a sheet from a stack of Bristol paper in his basement and his Japanese self-inking drawing brush, he drew the dream.
Where the branches of leaves grew out of the severed head’s eye sockets the words “Long Live Our Banks” splayed out across the paper. On the bottom of the page read the words “COVID-19: Labor Camp Report: March 24, 2020.”
This was the first drawing of 225.
The next day, on March 25, 2020, the MCAD art professor woke up to draw a hand cutting open a wound with a knife to let dollar signs bleed out. “Open it up! For Business!” is written in the footer. The following day a coffin with a dollar sign and the words “Your Death Is Their Profit.”
For the following eight months, Szyhalski would wake up every morning, read the news of the day, gather pieces of “news shrapnel” (He began collecting phrases that stood out to him on the news and started a list on his phone of those “fragments.” “When something explodes, bits and pieces of the news would get stuck in my head,” he says.), create a poster in his 100-something-year old Fulton home, and then post the drawing on his Instagram account @laborcamp.
One art exhibition at the Mia, a traveling art exhibition plastered on the walls of city blocks, and 2000 sold-out art books later, Szyhalski’s “COVID-19 Labor Camp Report” serves as a poignant and daily documentation of a country’s collective anxiety, frustration, and confusion during a life-altering year.
Artists often respond to current events by recreating them in their respective works. During the Spanish Flu, Edvard Munch drew a portrait of himself with the disease in an impressionist palette of murky blues, sickly pinks and reds, and pea greens. In 1917, Morton Schamberg captured the isolation of the flu through an empty New York cityscape in black and white in [View of Rooftops]. And through the greater half of 2020, Syzhalski spent an average of seven hours a day for 225 days—that’s 1575 hours in total— absorbing the news, taking stock of the country’s daily morale, and documenting it all with a 14 ½ by 21 sheet of paper and an ink brush.
Born in Kalisz and raised in Poznań, Szyhalski came of age during the reign of the communist Polish People’s Republic that emerged from World War II. He learned to speak English through high school classes in Poland—that’s when he read George Orwell’s 1984. ”You can imagine,” Szyhalski tells me, “under communist rule in Poland, that book hit a little too close to home.”
It wasn’t until he began pursuing art in the United States that he stopped considering his second language as a disadvantage. “That distance from the language, I think of it more as a medium to see events from an outsider’s perspective. It's the same idea that allows us to look at historical events in the past with a clearer mind, because we can see the big picture,” Szyhalski says.
When he left in the early 90s for the United States, Poland had just undergone a systemic transition of governmental power, shedding their communist regime, relaunching parliamentary elections, reforming the market, and undergoing large-scale privatization. Prior to 1990, Polish elections were “a performative joke,” per Szyhalski. “I never voted because it simply didn’t matter,” he says. Now in the United States as a legal alien, Szyhalski still has not voted in an election.
“There's a sense of urgency, or a kind of responsibility, to being present in that democratic space. So I like to think that, in some ways, I am able to vote through my work,” he says.
Szyhalski spent a few years in the Northeast before moving to Minnesota in 1995 to accept a teaching position at MCAD. He’s taught young artists everything from graphic design and propaganda art, to media art and performance-based art installations, a core focus of his own work.
The act of waking up to absorb daily headlines, doggedly draw pictures, post them to an account, and engage with the viewers, Szyhalski says, is a performance in and of itself. After the project began and more people followed along on his Labor Camp journey, he would spend his days discussing the pictures with followers.
“I look at that project and I see it as an event where I was engaged one hundred percent of the time. I was not just sharing the drawings, but also the process of making the drawings, the development of ideas, and engaging in hundreds and hundreds of conversations with people over that period of time,” he says. “I really do think that it was an eight-month-long performance.”
Mia commissioned Labor Camp from mid-March to mid-September of 2021, where it lived on the walls of Gallery 370. Walking into the space, fonts and phrases stylized in a manner reminiscent of war-era propaganda wash over you in a sea of stark whites and cutting blacks. Words wiz from the posters off the walls and pop into your head: “THEY LIE, WE DIE,” “I CAN’T BREATHE! IF IT ISN’T COVID IT’S THE POLICE,” “LISTEN, DEBATE, DEBASE, VOTE.”
“Even though we're talking about supposedly opposing systemic structures—communism and capitalism are supposed to occupy the opposite ends of the spectrum—the experience of last year,” Szyhalski says, “in a very depressing kind of way, reminded me of so many eerie echoes and unfortunate parallels to the kind of experience of living in Poland under a very different system.”
Now the project lives as a book, with 2000 copies sold out. Though getting your hands on one of these books is currently a difficult task, interested readers can witness the project where it began, on Szyhalski’s Labor Camp Instagram.
On the day of the 2020 election, Labor Camp’s 225-day documentation ended. “I can't imagine or I couldn't imagine back then continuing to work on this project with the same tone, with the same language, and all the sort of strategies that I developed over the eight months.” To Szyhalski, the day felt as though a chapter had ended.
A year later, I asked him if he believes things have changed since Labor Camp’s electoral ending. “Marginal gains have been made,” he says. “The damage of the last five years is going to be exponentially more dramatic than I could’ve ever imagined.”
We’ve seen a rise of populism worldwide, and the country is politically polarized more than ever. “But it happened here. This would be the last place I would expect something like that to take hold, but it did.”
So, what’s next? How do we emerge from all the horror we’ve collectively experienced throughout the pandemic, through the injustice, throughout a world that willingly cuts open a wound as long as dollar signs spurt out along with the blood?
“This will take a lot more work that really goes beyond politics. The kind of structures that we've learned to rely on for a kind of stability as a culture, I don't think we can count on those anymore. They've been compromised to such a degree that the only thing that we have left is each other. And I honestly feel that for me, this project, when I think back on it, it is the sense of community that emerged from it that I find actual, real hope in, and it's the fact that we were able to connect and find a footing in that connection in each other, somehow. That to me is the real currency, the real value of the whole thing. That's why this was worthwhile.”
