WILLIAM POWHIDA: Complicities

About

Produced over the last ten months in the wake of the crisis at the Whitney Museum, Powhida makes visible generalized and abstract systems — investment, real estate, museum boards, private family-owned companies, curation, public policy  — to counter map the connections between art and the ruling class. Through specific subjects and case studies of Warren Kanders, The Koch Brothers, The Sackler family, The Venice Biennale, and Stephen A. Ross’s Hudson Yards project, Powhida uses an aesthetic of what might be best described as ‘capitalist realism’ to render what neoliberal governance looks like and how art is instrumentalized to perpetuate a system of private-public relationships.  Punctuating these exhausting slow takes are a series of paintings based on the artist’s Instragram memes drawn from films and series including Halloween, Don’t Look Now, The Terminator, Robocop, Chernobyl, and Billions that offer a different kind and degree of reflection on art’s role in society.