Centering on the iconic spacecraft that in 1976 transformed Parliament-Funkadelic concerts into interstellar journeys, the exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Mothership: a visionary creation that, in Clinton’s words, took “the ’hood into outer space.”
George Clinton remains one of the most unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music, renowned for extravagant performances in which stage production and sonic production are used to psychedelically transport his viewers. As ambitious as it was improbable, the Mothership – a silver, pyramid-shaped vessel that landed on-stage with Clinton himself as Dr. Funkenstein on board – captured the imagination of Parliament’s audiences by bringing psychedelic culture into the mainstream at a moment when the space race remained an ongoing cultural obsession.Drawing from an eclectic constellation of references, Clinton's paintings construct dreamlike worlds in which the logic of a non-narrative typology gives way to rhythm and vibration. Across the canvases, void-like forms recalling the silhouette of the Mothership hover at the center of the picture plane. Untethered from ground or horizon, these suspended forms occupy indeterminate fields where space is rendered not as empty expanse but as a living, psychic terrain in which possibility continuously circulates.
Across the paintings, Clinton deploys a vivid palette of electric pinks, saturated blues, and radiant yellows that has become synonymous with the visual culture surrounding Parliament-Funkadelic and its Afrofuturist imagination. Suggestive of celestial atmospheres and synthetic light, these colors transform pictorial space into an environment of continual emergence. Together with the recurring form of the Mothership, they produce a visual language in which cosmic travel becomes synonymous to Clinton’s music and performances.
Image: George Clinton, Ethereal De-cloaking, 2023. Courtesy of George Clinton.
Artist Portrait of George Clinton. Photo by Lynsey Weatherspoon, Redux. Courtesy of George Clinton.
