William Powhida presents Possibilities for Representation (2020), at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, that is included in Twenty Twenty exhibition. The exhibition has been launched in October and will be open until 2021. William Powhida is a visual artist and former art critic, based in Brooklyn, New York.
The main idea of this work is to give a picture of the relation between money, politics, and art. Powhida’s work consists of portraits of political figures that are connected by lines, like a diagram. It reminds me of Alfred H. Barr’s diagram about the sources and evolution of modern art.
Both Powhida’s and Barr’s works are not only seen as charts but artworks, like a painting that gives us a picture of our circumstances. These works might be seen not as a definitive or historically correct statement, but rather as an expression of the artists.
Powhida started the painting in January 2020, with the anxiety about the outcome of the coming US election. After the election results have declared, Powhida told theartnewspaper.com, he is “deeply relieved that (his) decision to give Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a very subtle edge in the seemingly glacial presidential race was proven correct by some 74 million voters.”
Possibilities for Representation (2020) is pivotal, especially because the four years of tumultuous circumstances has been ended by Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s winning of the US presidential election. There is an implied message that in order to produce good politicians and political conditions, a healthy political process should be pursued.
