In Native American, European and African cultures the trickster and the trick in oral history and literature is the story.  Her presentation of Power by these four artists actually pushed us into a space of vulnerability and surprise.  She is planning an exhibition titled Girls and Weakness in January and we look forward to her provocation of gender then.

VISIONARY presents Asha Ganpat’s Boys and Power.

This interview took place by e-mail October 2008.

- Noelle Lorraine Williams| VISIONARY  | A Project of REBORN
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POWER TO THE PEOPLE | BOYS AND POWER
ASHA GANPAT
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| Asha Ganpat is messing with your dreams of gender and power.
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"...Socialization is a universal method which teaches the young to become their own captors.  I am my own captor, just as you are yours.  There are exceptional visual artists and other thinkers who have stumbled upon the limits of their personal captivity....  After we experience their works, we are changed. " - ASHA GANPAT
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NOELLE LORRAINE WILLIAMS|One thing that is interesting about your work as an artist and curator is that you engage sex and gender throughout your work.  However, it doesn't seem to be a central focus but rather apart of a series of ideologies including punishment, religion, morality, power and international migration.

What was your impetus in organizing "Boys and Power?"

ASHA GANPAT| I have had some difficulty understanding why contemporary curators put together all-female or all-male shows.  I see little need for gender segregation in exhibitions and throughout life, often more than others.  (This does range from bathrooms with gender-based icons to pre-marriage rites to clothing and make-up)  I know that my views are extreme when compared with the general populus', but they are the views I have come to accept as the most enjoyable to have.  To put it lightly, I just can't see why it matters which bathroom I go into, or with a bit more accusation, why one is for me and one is off limits.

Socialization is a universal method which teaches the young to become their own captors.  I am my own captor, just as you are yours.  There are exceptional visual artists and other thinkers who have stumbled upon the limits of their personal captivity.  This means they have found yours and mine too, because we are together-socialized we share many of these limits with one another.  Then these exceptional people create works which twist, trick and question our very selves.  After we experience their works, we are changed.  What these artists are doing is simply getting us to think more deeply than we had before.  The things we take for granted are put into light.  This is the situation I strive for with my own work.  Gender, sexuality, religion, morality...it is all the same problem to explore from this perspective.

For the BOYS AND POWER exhibition, I wanted to push my own limits.  I decided to do the thing the got on my nerves so much.  An all male show about men who wield power over others.  It felt obnoxious, an epitome of that which I stand and speak out against.  It started with Zachary Green.  He is an artist who works in Hoboken and creates exquisite stained glass panels.  The first piece of the show and the piece all others were chosen around was a portrait of Benito Mussolini.  In the piece, we see him standing with his hands at his sides gazing off into the distance, exuding pride and confidence.  That work might have been the only piece which could persuade me into an exhibition of this nature.  The sister exhibition, GIRLS AND WEAKNESS is presently in the making.  I believe that I must be fair and jump into each polarity of this nature.
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David Keefe
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NOELLE LORRAINE WILLIAMS|The pieces in the show project isolated images of masculinity and isolation – not only in their visual composition but also in their relationship to other subjects (animate and inanimate) and the emotional tenor of the work.

Artist Kehinde Wiley whose work focuses on representations of masculinity in portraiture explains "my perception of painting, which is for me an enterprise about very powerful men. The history of painting has been the history of those men trying to position themselves in fields of power that are very defined and codified as a type of vocabulary that's evolved over time."

ASHA GANPAT|I agree with Wiley's take on the history of painting; it is both a sad and true thing.  Yes, painting has been widely ruled by portraits of and about powerful men.  However, we must remember that history is not the same as the past.  We are fortunate to have artists like Artemesia Gentileschi slip through the cracks of censure and suppression to remind us that each painting is a singular struggle of the painter, not a singular triumph of a powerful man.  It is easy to forget that the works presented by scholars in their Art History books and museum walls are not unbiased surveys of the past but instead are only recreated histories where exclusion is integral to posterity.  And that's how you really win this game, you only count if you are remembered. 

Wiley has picked up, so successfully, the quiet cues of isolation from historical works and often paints his subjects so large and proud that there would not be room for anything else in the frame. Wiley's solitude was a different type than the one experienced by the subjects in the works of the BOYS AND POWER show.  David Keefe's landscapes with double self-portraits have a lonely, outsider type of solitude.  Drawing from his childhood environs and the aggressive Iraq war-scape, he carefully places himself twice, not as two people existing at the same time but instead as one person with straying thoughts of two different times.  These memories come together in his paintings like the moment when a dream becomes a nightmare or the reverse.
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"We are fortunate to have artists like Artemesia Gentileschi slip through the cracks of censure and suppression to remind us that each painting is a singular struggle of the painter, not a singular triumph of a powerful man. " - ASHA GANPAT
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