May 20th 2017

Without Power, No Cookies

@ Slow

2153 W 21st St, Chicago, IL 60608

Opening Saturday, May 20th, from 6PM - 9PM

On view through Saturday, June 17th

Christa Donner, Howard Fonda, Matthew Girson, Vesna Jovanovic

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.

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