Karissa Kendricks & Ben K. Voss

Rumpelstiltskin is pleased to present an exhibition featuring selections from a series of watercolors by Ben K. Voss and several sculptures by Karissa Kendricks.

Most families have a story that gets repeated again and again over dinners, to the annoyance and delight of everyone who's heard it a million times before. In my family it's the story of how my grandfather helped to develop the plastic milk bag. This sealed bladder of milk, a staple of my childhood, is common throughout the world. Family gatherings were loud, chaotic affairs. Cousins ran everywhere while aunts and uncles talked over each other. It was difficult for anyone to get a word in, or finish a sentence. Anyone, that is, except my grandfather. When he spoke, we listened.

He would tell us the story of the milk bag, and he was clearly proud of his involvement. Later, looking through his documents, I found a speech on the same topic that he had given to a gathering of former employees. In 1964 he was tasked with finding new business opportunities for DuPont Canada. Founded in 1802 in Wilmington, Delaware, as a gunpowder mill, DuPont later turned to industrial chemical production, including the development of synthetic textiles, paints, and polymers like nylon, Tyvek, and Teflon. One morning, while working on the problem of expanding DuPont's Canadian markets, my grandfather's colleague Jean Paul Trudel came into his office and asked: "what's the cheapest way to package a liquid?" "In a bag!" my grandfather replied, and so they began to work on how to package milk in bags. The story goes that when it came time to test the seal on the bag, Trudel marched into my grandfather's office and threw the bag across the room to prove that it wouldn't break. It didn't.'