ENERGY

ENERGY

Bernard Childs, Jonathan Dedecker, Alicia Gibson, Gilda Snowden, Kohana Wilson

Curated by Mark Sengbusch 

October 17th, 2026 - November 15th, 2026

We need Energy. The Art World needs Energy, and these artists bring it big time. Whether its physical energy of paint application like Jonathan Dedecker and Alicia Gibson or Cosmic Energy like Bernard Childs who was stationed in the South Pacific in World War II and studied the horizon from his ship’s bridge. There are vibrations in these works that extend beyond the physical. Beneath the surface there are personal and emotional stories.

In an era where safe and fast art reign, the artists in ENERGY cater to no one. Energy takes time. And in the art making process time slows down. Then possibilities emerge. Kohana Wilson spends months on their films using a slow, iterative frame-by-frame process. “Animation is the medium for transformation”. Wilson is interested in hand-drawn animation’s relationship to choreography, shape-shifting, and gesture. This is the ultimate investment in layers. Slow and low, that is the tempo.

Gilda Snowden was my friend and she had high energy, which is reflected in her work. She was my first Painting professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in the late 90’s. I remember her studio well. Packed with Art and paint everywhere, radio on, music on and a movie playing all at once! Layers again. You would see her at EVERY opening and I’m honored to have her work in this exhibition. She would fit right in at Field of Play.

Thank you for bringing your energy too!

ARTIST BIOS

Bernard Childs (1910–1985) was an artist who worked in Paris and New York. He was primarily a painter and printmaker, and pioneered the direct engraving of metal plates with power tools. As a kind of counterpoint to his many-layered work, which is often symbolic and a fusion of abstraction and figuration, in 1959 he also started painting portraits. Childs' formal interests were line and space, light and color, and the dialogue of contrasting elements.

Jonathan DeDecker is an abstract painter and co-founder of Stone/Age, currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his BFA from the University of Minnesota and his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA.

DeDecker’s work has been exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Stallman Gallery (Berlin, DE), Sebastian Gladstone (Los Angeles, CA), Marvin Gardens (Ridgewood, NY), and Space 1026 (Philadelphia, PA). His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions such as Love Poems at Anton Kern (New York, NY), Threshold and Thriller at The Penthouse (New York and Brooklyn, NY), I Paint What I Want to See at Everyday Gallery (Antwerp, BE), The 2020 Group Show at Good Mother Gallery (Oakland, CA), New Raw Green at Sim Smith Gallery (London, UK), and Staring at the Sun at Left Field Gallery (San Luis Obispo, CA). He was a resident artist at the Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY.

Alicia Gibson- My work explores energy as an immediate, visceral reaction—ruminated on for too long, then driven out fast. Though both deeply personal yet topical, these pieces are sifted through layers of humor, satire, and wordplay, keeping the heavy light and the satire sharp.

Working with the energetic, often garish possibilities of oil paint alongside directional graphite drawings, my mark-making is direct and frenetic. I embrace the physical reality of making—including the literal shake in my hand, which I call the tic of the hand—to guide the viewer’s eye through shifts from dark to light, micro to macro. In Energy, these works capture the chaotic takeaway of a situation: relatable, irreverent and relentlessly moving.

Gilda Snowden (1954-2014) was born in Detroit, Michigan and graduated from Cass Technical High School in 1972.  She received her undergraduate (BFA,) and graduate degrees (MA and MFA) from Wayne State University (WSU). She taught painting and drawing at Wayne State University from 1979 to 1985, then left WSU and became a full-time professor at the College for Creative Studies (CCS). During her tenure at CCS, she was twice asked to be interim chair of the Fine Arts Department while a search for a permanent chair was underway.

As an active participant in the Metropolitan Detroit art community, Gilda began exhibiting her work while still a graduate student. She was one of the original Cass Corridor Artists; her work has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally since 1977. Her exhibition SIGNATURE IMAGES at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1990, resulted in several works being purchased for the museum collection. One of these works, MONUMENT, is one of the 400 works featured in the book TREASURES OF THE DIA that was published in November 2007.  Her works have also been exhibited in Mexico, Canada, Italy, and West Africa. Gilda’s works are in over 1800 private and corporate collections, including Post/ Newsweek WDIV Detroit, the Neiman-Marcus Corporation, Ameritech, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Compuware, Henry Ford Hospital, The Detroit Medical Center, Beatrice Foods, the City of Detroit, and the Kresge Foundation. In June of 2007, the new MGM Grand Casino in Detroit acquired a series of prints of Gilda’s that are featured in each of the 400 rooms of the MGM Grand Hotel. In 2015 the Cobo Center (TCF Center) established the Gilda Snowden Hall which houses over 15 of her paintings and constructions. Her work is also in the permanent collection of: the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 2009, Gilda was selected as one of the inaugural cohorts to receive a $25,000 Kresge Artist Fellowship .  This award was established to support the artistic achievements of established artists in the Detroit/Metro Detroit area.  The Kresge Artist Fellowship is one of many charitable grants established by the Kresge Foundation, a philanthropic private foundation based in Troy, Michigan . To honor Gilda’s memory , in 2015  the Kresge Foundation established the annual Gilda Awards, granting $5,000 to four emerging artists to help further their work and boost their careers. Since its start, the Gilda Awards has increased to 10 recipients, a yearly total of $50,000 given to young, up-and-coming artists in the Detroit area, continuing Gilda’s legacy of supporting and mentoring new talent.  

Kohana Wilson (b. Hong Kong, they/them) is an animator, director, and teacher. They currently live in Brooklyn, NY. They are part-time lecturer in the Illustration department at the Parsons School of Design, where they teach drawing and animation classes. They make narrative and experimental animated films using a slow, iterative frame-by-frame process primarily with graphite, pastel, and ink on paper. Inspired by keen observations of the natural world, they play with asymmetrical timing, elastic characters, and nonsense gravity. Animation is the medium of transformation. Animation shows us the capacity for change because animation is change - change is its operating principle. Through analog animation, Kohana makes films that explore transformation, iteration, and accumulated trace. They’re drawn to persistent materials and their persistent traces, often reaching for drawing materials that can be smudged, blurred, and erased, exploring what emerges from their ghostly remnants. They’re interested in hand-drawn animation’s relationship to choreography, shape-shifting, and gesture.

With special thanks to Judith Childs, Bank/MAB Society, Donna Snowden, and Duo Fine Arts.