Happiest Hour

Performance, 2025.

Happiest Hour was a participatory public performance that took place in The Portland Building, which houses the government offices for the city of Portland, Oregon. Participants were lead through a series of playful, open-ended memos, or performance scores, sent from “the boss” that had to be completed together before they could leave for the weekend. Happiest Hour asked participants to reconceive the material of the office—paper shredders, management hierarchy, and retirement parties—as board room game fodder. In doing so, it poked fun at the absurdity of institutional allegiance, centering the power of collective imagination and play instead. In the age of remote work, dwindling job markets, and job replacement by artificial intelligence, Happiest Hour invokes a long gone era when the worst part of a job was having one and the best part was getting to be in hell everyday together.

Photographs by ame morrison.