White Room: Jeff Funnell

White Columns is pleased to present ‘Instructions for 59 Drawings, Raymond Roussel’ (2004-2009): the first solo New York exhibition by the Winnipeg-based artist Jeff Funnell. Funnell’s installation consists of a dense cluster of more than two hundred individually framed drawings, and a group of forty-three text works (out of an original fifty-nine), typed on canvases. In 1928 Roussel sent instructions for 59 drawings to a commercial illustrator. Funnell has said that this work is “his attempt to respond anew to these instructions.” Whilst not exclusively related to individual drawings, the text works function almost as a form of ‘subtitles’, alluding to absent – or more accurately displaced – images. In the drawings, which in Funnell’s terms “haphazardly explode onto the wall”, a fractured and fragmentary narrative with no logical beginning or end emerges. Drawn in a seemingly casual manner the work suggests an almost diary-like, (auto)biographical drift – but one that is neither underscored nor fully revealed. Like much of Funnell’s production any sense of resolution – or closure – remains intentionally elusive.

Jeff Funnell (b. 1941) lives and work in Winnipeg, Canada. He received an MFA from the University of Cincinnati in 1970, and a BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1967. Since 1974 he has been a professor at the University of Manitoba School of Art. Solo exhibitions include: Winnipeg Art Gallery (1992); Southern Alberta Art Gallery (1991); and Plug In, Winnipeg (1979 and 1980.) Recent group exhibitions include: ‘La Biennale de Montreal, Montreal (2007); and ‘Screen’, White Columns, New York (2007) – which included a collaborative film work made with John Will, which was originally shown at the Exploitation Gallery, Calgary, AB, in 1982.