Fred Torres Collaborations

Humor in all of its forms, including social satire, wordplay, games and jokes, has been an underlying theme in art, throughout the 20th century. Dada's playfulness is the precursor of this thread, born as a response to the destruction wreaked on a global scale during WWI. KNOCK KNOCK explores how artists have drawn on this strategy, using humor as a hook to tackle more complex social, sexual, and political issues. The resulting historical exhibition, mounted over two venues, is superficially all farce, gaffs, puns and parody, and exposes the embedded tensions inherent in the work when the laughter dies down.