Curated by Christa Maiwald Laurence Hegarty, Christa Maiwald, Jennie Nichols and TOKYO KAMEN

“The maker-taker model, popularized by the equity and options trading industries, offers rebates for market makers - the market participants who bring liquidity to an exchange - while charging fees to customers who remove liquidity from the exchange.”

—PRNewswire

The exhibition title Maker Taker refers loosely to the haves and the have nots, sellers and buyers, those who allot and those who keep. Hats, lamps, dolls, and shoes are borne by a range of characters to engage the subjects of pop culture, immoderate consumption, political horror and drunken reverie.

The objects created by Laurence Hegarty, Christa Maiwald, Jennie Nichols, and TOKYO KAMEN are clearly “hand made.” Found objects - Hegarty’s plastic pigs, Maiwald’s Servitude lamps, Nichols’s frames and shoes, TOKYO KAMEN’s designer shopping bags - are embraced and transformed. The bright colors and innocent images belie an undercurrent of danger and unrest in the world, for they are offset by tacks in shoes, scary dolls, the menacing “big drip,” and abusive employers.

The look of the show as a store - with recession prices (for the art world) - is deliberate, its contents evoking desire, indulgence, and decadence, along with the fantasy and hope of transformation.

Maker Taker is an evolving exhibition. The first version was presented at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, New York. As it develops, other artists and new work will be added.