Past Exhibitions

Funkaesthetics

February 12 - March 23, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday February 12, 2009 (6 pm - 8 pm)

Image Left: Adrian Piper, Funk Lessons, performance, 1983. Courtesy of the artist.
Image Right: Free Dance Lessons (Paige Gratland & Day Milman), 2004. Video still by Samara Liu. Courtesy of the artists.

Curated by: Luis Jacob & Pan Wendt

With work by Pedro Bell, Leigh Bowery, Free Dance Lessons (Paige Gratland & Day Milman), Fergus Greer, David Gwinnutt, Nick Knight, Will Munro, Adrian Piper, P-Funk, Salvatore Salamone, Sun Ra, and Stephen Willats.

Funk is best known as a style of dance-music that originated in the polyrhythmic innovations of James Brown during the 1960s, and culminated with George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic (P-Funk) during the 1970s.  Funk is both a style of music and a form of social experience.  Emerging from the African-American musical traditions of gospel, rhythm-and-blues, rock 'n' roll, and jazz, it manifests a utopian dimension in its emphasis on spiritual togetherness, collective pleasure, and shameless bodily expression.

Funkaesthetics is premised on the idea that Funk constitutes a uniquely rich system of thought.  With its interest in the distant past of ancient Egypt and the allegorical futures of science-fiction, in its freakish costumes and focus on the figure of "the alien", Funk manifests a vision of time and identity as mutable and open to transformation.  The exhibition is an occasion to consider Funk in the context of its birth at the time of Black consciousness and the struggles for civil rights in the United States. Funkaesthetics is also presented as a uniquely fertile and thought-provoking opportunity for us to reconsider Funk – here and today – in its sinister aspects as well as in its more familiar utopian aspects.

Financially supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Luis Jacob is a Toronto-based artist whose work has shown in the Kunstverein in Hamburg (Hamburg), the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (Antwerp), the Barbican Art Gallery (London), and Documenta 12 (Kassel).  His curatorial projects include "Golden Streams: Artists' Collaboration and Exchange in the 1970s" (Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga, 2002), and "The JDs Years: 1980s Queer Zine Culture from Toronto" (Art Metropole, Toronto, and Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, 1999).

Pan Wendt is an art historian, curator and critic. A PhD candidate in History of Art at Yale University, he is also Adjunct Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, P.E.I. Curatorial projects include “Colleen Wolstenholme: A Divided Room” (Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 2007-8); “Ingrid Mary Percy: soft block/hard edge” (Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 2007); and “James Lee Byars: Letters From the World’s Most Famous Unknown Artist" (Mass MoCA, 2004). He is currently researching and writing about the work of Turin-based artist collective Lo Zoo.

 

 

REVIEWS

Sholem Krishtalka: "A Raucous Theory of Funk, Fun is the Best Revenge". Extra Magazine. March 12, 2009

 

 

David Balzer: "Funkaesthetics". Eye Weekly. February 25, 2009

 

David Jager: "Let's Get Funky". Now Magazine. February 2009