Cosmic Vibes and Corner Junk, an essay on Mystic Taxi by Gean Moreno, Senior Curator at ICA Miami:
Here is what we should know by now: that cosmic vibes flow through derelict houses, broken bodies, scrapped knees, greasy fingers, tarnished heirlooms, key-carved counters, discarded vials, sticky amp cords, besotted speaker cabinets, (so-called)debased forms. Funk is nothing but the gift of being able to pick the sublime from the very core of what is grim and what is grimy, what is lowly and common, which, by the way, are the only places where the sublime really lies as a useful secret endowment. Funk, uncut, as Stuart Hall and bell hooks liked to sit with it, where the wound is at stake as much as its repair, is that catalytic pump that unfastens the errant excess—that invents it as a manifestation in formal structures—from the category that strives to hold a thing down; it’s what makes the last word on a thing the second to last word, springing it to liberation on a different frequency. Raging storms at sea and erupting volcanos are surely scary enough to leave us speechless, but there is no shelter, no point of communion, that takes shape before them, aside from the suffocating room of the shared terror that they elicit. The sublime I am talking about, the sublime that happens right where the blighted sideswipes the cosmic, lives next to the maggots and the milk crates that flank the makeshift domino table. It lives in the common at that precise moment when the common flips into everything we need and we know we need, where it becomes sheltering space and rewrites the coordinates of mundane and profound in such a way as to conflate them; at the moment, that is, that common things begin to practice a logic of eclipse, making of identity a dissolving category—the bars of a cage dissolve into the bars of a song.