This painting depicts a young woman kneeling on the floor, arms outstretched to balance books, with another book placed on her head. A male figure stands before her, his face obscured, adjusting the book on top. The scene is domestic, calm, almost gentle—there is no explicit aggression. Yet it is exactly within this softness that the structural force of power becomes sharper. Discipline here is not coercion; it is achieved through posture, balance, calibration, endurance, and the smallest mechanics of compliance. “Discipline” reveals how shaping happens not through command, but through the quiet internalization of the idea that “this is the correct way to be.”
At the same time, “Discipline” aligns precisely with the conceptual spine of the exhibition “Father Figure”: the work does not return to fatherhood as a violent agent, but to fatherhood as a silent system that penetrates, shapes, and embeds itself inside the most vulnerable zones of trust. In this series, Towers repeatedly lets the male figure appear only as a shadow, a fragment, a hand. The male is no longer fully present, yet the system remains intact. Power does not require the body—it requires the belief that its logic is natural. Thus, this painting is not simply about the posture itself, but about why this posture is culturally accepted as “right.” The work exposes a higher register of power: the one that functions not by force, but by unquestioned internal agreement.