Without power, no cookies
Without power, no cookies
Christa Donner, Howard Fonda, Matthew Girson, Vesna Jovanovic
May 20 - June 17, 2017
Good things go to the capable. Diligence prevails. You earned it. You deserve good things.
I lived in Germany for a while. I worked in a chemical plant. My immediate supervisor would constantly say: Ohne Kraft, keine Kekse (literal translation: Without power, no cookies). It stood out because German expressions are commonly not cute in their wording. Leaves me with a burning question.
So then the Girl Scouts rule the world, right?
Phrases like this shift in meaning when they pass from one person to another, one language to another, one power struggle to another, one political climate to another. Painters are sometimes presumed to work in a binary structure. Some focus on the material, the moves made with a brush. Others make illusions, and those illusions announce a point of view. These painters present as non-binary. There is narrative intention, but there is purchase in every gesture. These artists are driven by questions of power, but their answers come in the heft of a stroke and the way it is controlled as much as a portrait of someone denied or granted sovereignty.
And cookies. Just cookies.