Working across painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation, Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter views media as a range of languages that can be drawn upon and experimented with to re-envision storytelling.
For Collapse and Incompletion, his first solo exhibition in a public museum, he is presenting a new series of installations that investigate historical material and synthesize physical and digital archives. A nod to notions of collective and diasporic memory, this exhibition sees Hunter evolve his work into new forms of multidisciplinary experimentation that respond to the space and setting of Gairloch Gardens by Lake Ontario.
Considering his artistic practice a research process, Hunter conducts rigorous research into wide-ranging sources like archives, videos, music, texts, and images. Assembling together the various archival fragments, he then uses techniques such as “referencing," “sampling," and “remixing" to demonstrate the active exploration and re-contextualization of history. His ongoing work True and Functional, originally conceived as an online audio project, is developed into a multi-channel video installation in the gallery, alongside new sculptures and fabric prints. Alternating between exploratory and didactic approaches, Hunter questions the assumed neutrality of dominant narratives and reflects on speculation as a strategy for decolonization.
Collapse and Incompletion is commissioned by Oakville Galleries with the support of Partners in Art and will feature a forthcoming monograph in 2024.
LAUNCH: trueandfunctional.com
In tandem with the Timothy Yanick Hunter's recent exhibition at Oakville Galleries, a new volume of trueandfunctional.com has launched, featuring a collection of intertextual research and audiovisual pieces made by Hunter.
True and Functional originated in 2020 as a web platform where Hunter would gather and remix audiovisual materials that he encountered during his research. On trueandfunctional.com, Hunter visualizes his ideas through the structure of a mixtape, each “volume" containing a compilation of images, videos, and texts related to his forays into different topics that then become a personal archive of Black diasporic culture. Complementing these are video and audio-based works that he creates, demonstrating the active exploration and re-contextualization of history.
