The exhibition, planned to coincide with the 2016 conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), explored the ways artists working in clay and other “traditional” materials approach the visual deluge of the internet and its attendant culture of immediacy, shock, and humor.

The included artists harness the internet’s glitchy, ridiculous, virtual reality to create work with an irreverent humor that at once exposes, critiques, and embraces contemporary culture. No practice is too hallowed, no subject too taboo for their gleefully satirical approach. In this, they can be seen as the inheritors--the mentees-at-a-remove--of California Funk. And just as the original Funk artists devised their aesthetic at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, so too are the artists in #F*nked! responding to the cultural tumult around them.

Just as internet culture draws from all over to create its diverse and chaotic offerings, contemporary art and craft blurs the boundaries between disciplines and smudges the expanses between ideas. This irreverent, recombinant, internet-inflected style has ceramics at its fore--perhaps for the same associations that made it appealing to the Funk artists before them--but extends to other media, materials, and disciplines, as evidenced by the broad range of work in this show. Rooted in ceramic history and incorporating its modes and object types, #F*nked! investigates the culture of now to imagine the future that lies ahead.

(adapted from the exhibition text)