It’s not such a process that I would say I’m always super aware of. One analogy I’ve used to describe my work before is a Rube Goldberg machine, which is a type chain reaction machine often used to complete a task. In the context of my work I think it’s a good metaphor because at any particular stage in the steps of the machine unfolding it can be hard to understand how the machine got from point A to point Z without witnessing each step–meaning in any given exhibition of mine it can be difficult to understand “how I got here” without having seen several previous exhibitions. There’s a consistent internal logic to the whole project, even though it might not be apparent externally (maybe this applies to all art though?). I’ve basically been making one continuous work since 2013, and this is why I always refer to my website (formerly ParkerIto.com, now Parker.sex) as my “masterwork,” because this is the easiest place to trace the steps and follow the whole process. Although, sometimes I feel like framing the work in the context of a continuously expanding, protean entity is a barrier of entry for viewers who haven’t followed my work the past decade.
An artist friend once said to me, “some artists have a hard time starting, some artists have a hard time stopping.” I’m definitely the latter–it’s very hard for me to make one iteration of something because I can usually imagine it several different ways. I just opened an exhibition in London with Rose Easton and there is a “new” sculpture in the show that I have been working on since 2021. In 2020 I started exhibiting these hacked scanners with different objects on them. The scanners are hacked to be able to control the speeds of the scan bars, as well as the standard all-white LEDs in a typical scanner have been replaced with fully programmable LEDs. Each scanner I’ve made has been programmed to perform a different kind of “light show.” And like I mentioned, there had been various objects I made to put on the scanners. The first objects were stainless steel, then bronze, and in 2021 I produced some cast glass objects for the scanners. The glass figure itself is a character that has continuously been in my work since 2014, and the character has taken many different forms over the years.
After exhibiting the first scanner works I realized that there was this very prominent sonic element naturally occuring from the droning sound of the scanners that I wanted to emphasize, so I installed contact mics into the scanners to be able to amplify the sound. Then a Max/MSP patch has been created by my composer friend Jay Israelson which takes in the sound of the scanner in real time, converts it to MIDI and then interprets the MIDI into musical sounds with pre-programmed parameters. There is also a video component to the sculpture which exists as subtitles over the sounds of the scanner “talking.” I imagine that I will continue to evolve the scanner sculptures each opportunity I get to show them.
Yes, the scanner sculpture is a portrait of the artist looking and being looked at but it is all self-contained, and in addition to being the art and artist, the sculpture is also its own audience.
What you are talking about, the conflation of the medium and message, is just the conditions of living post Internet. This is present in all art ever made, in its relationship to contemporary network societies, but my art often does intentionally point to this taking place. I am always hesitant to use the word “technology” in relation to my work because I think when people use this term they have a specific idea of what that means in association to art. Rather, I think of myself as someone who has a curiosity about technologies. Chapstick is a technology. Turning dirt into clay is a technology. A vintage point and shoot camera is a technology. These are all compelling tools for me to use and I think the internet makes it easier to learn about these things. For me it is very natural to approach making art by mixing the technologies.
From 2017-2021, I made a group of still life paintings based on photos I had taken in my apartment in Hollywood. The original images were captured on a digital point and shoot camera from the early 2000s. I started working with these cameras in 2016 because, after having spent several years making paintings sourced from images I had found, I placed a restriction on my work that I’d only make paintings from images I’d created. I also just wanted the images to feel different from an iPhone photo, or something shot on a new camera, while trying to avoid the “snapshot aesthetic” of film. To turn the images into oil paintings I used what is called a Wire Jet printer–a very rare machine from the early ’90s developed by a Mormon inventor. The technology for this machine is somewhat wrapped up in an IP blackhole with 3M, but I discovered a studio in New York that had one of these printers.
Even though the machine is called a printer it doesn’t really work like a printer–imagine a 4 axis CNC machine that has an airbrush type head. Hand mixed oil paints can be run through the printer to approximate CMYK printing. The machine is very idiosyncratic (it still runs on an old version of windows), and this means the results are always unpredictable and low resolution. Often there would be “errors” that would be incorporated in the final version of the paintings. In Los Angeles I would paint textures on canvases, send them to New York to be printed, and then the paintings would come back to my studio where my studio assistants would touch them up based on the original images we had sent to the printer. So the final painted image is somewhere in between the original images I took on the point and shoot and the way the printer has decided to interpret those images.
I bring all this up because I tend to think of myself as a classicist. Most of the common forms my work takes are very classical art objects and the themes and genres I work in tend to fall in line with the greatest hits of Western art history. But maybe my journey to making these objects has a lot more detours than the classic approach.
I never think of these things in terms of a loss. It’s more like how energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed.
When I was just in Paris I went to the Arte Povera show at the Bourse de commerce. I am familiar with some of the artists involved with Arte Povera but have spent very little time actually reading any literature about the movement. One of the exhibition wall texts I skimmed over mentioned how the Arte Povera artists were focused on making artworks that embodied the transference of energy. Doing a bit of googling I found an article about the exhibition where Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator, is quoted as saying, (Arte Povera) “says the artwork is not in its materiality, but in its constant, vital transformation of energy.”
The above sounds very much like the art objects associated with Post Internet, in that, Post Internet as a movement, was very conscious of the networks that art objects existed in–a network first approach to object making. One of the ways this happened was through Post Internet’s reliance on the documentation of an art object as a continuance (or precursor) of the art itself. Some of my NFT friends (who are much younger than me) were having a discussion on twitter about a particular artwork that was very heavily associated with Post Internet, and one of them spoke about how amazing the sculpture looked in photos but in person it looked completely unsexy and lifeless.
And all of this goes back to what I was talking about in my previous answer–the reality of the conditions of living Post Internet. Objects, people, places, etc., all of these things exist in a constant hovering of ambiguity- an in-between-ness. Coming up in the Net Art scene I’d often meet up with someone who I’d known mostly from their online persona, only to find that in person they were very different. I’m working on this long text right now, but one of the personal anecdotes I write about is seeing Post Impressionist paintings for the first time and it being very disappointing compared to the JPEG versions I had seen online.
And this is the agony and ecstasy of our times, a phrase I’ve returned to over and over in my own work. The first series of paintings that I got known for (in the context of the art market) used this phrase as their title. The series of paintings were abstractions I had made on a special reflective fabric that became completely illegible when you tried to photograph the paintings with a flash. The fabric also shifted how the paintings looked depending on the lighting conditions. It was impossible to ever get a “true” view of the paintings, and so, seeing the paintings in person became just as important as viewing them through their documentation.
The hummingbird video I made in 2023 for my musician friend Jay Israelson’s song “The World Outside” is a continuation of this idea, but more in metaphor. It’s the first time there is a formal, aesthetic representation of trying to describe something liminal in my work. I had always had this fantasy of becoming a bird photographer but it seemed too technical. During covid I started filming and photographing the hummingbirds that visited my balcony. Because I was stuck in my apartment all day I learned the schedules of the hummingbirds and could anticipate when they would be around. I was using the same digital point and shoot I mentioned before and so it became nearly impossible to capture the birds moving, as the camera was too unsophisticated to deal with the speed of a hummingbird. To compensate for this I took the footage and slowed it down, very slow. So slow that because of the low quality, the editing program started to interpolate new frames into the footage where there is not enough data. The effect is hard to describe but it kind of looks like a video made with AI.
That same year I was doing a show at my friend’s apartment in Hollywood and one of the paintings I showed was a big painting of the couch I had in my old apartment. My friend made a comment to me about how he thought it was ironic at a moment that abstraction was so in vogue that I had decided to make a figurative painting (is a painting of a couch figurative?). I’d never really thought of my work in such black and white terms as abstraction versus figuration, but his comment got me thinking about a series of paintings that visualized the spectrum of figurative and abstract images. So since 2023 all of the paintings I have made have tried to deal with that somehow. The endpoints for my spectrum have primarily been images of medieval sculpture and abstractions I make by misting photographic dyes onto jute.
It’s hard for me to say whether I subvert expectations, I think that’s something for an audience to decide. I rarely think about an audience’s point of view when I’m in the studio making something. I’m mostly concerned with my own expectations of what my artwork should or shouldn’t be.
The approach is always different when it comes to materials. I have a very limited skill set when it comes to the technical side of art making, and this is a mixture of lacking patience to be able to master a particular craft, but also I never wanted to become narrowly focused on a skillset or style. For me making art is much more of a preoccupation with the challenge of trying to materialize something I can visualize stylistically in my head. The initial visualization is often unfocused and raw, but I usually understand right away how I want that thing to make me feel when I’m looking at it translated into object form. As I move through a chosen material and start translating my idea the limitations of the materials start to become more apparent and that really helps focus the original idea into something more legible. At times I’ve had up to 10 studio assistants and worked with dozens of fabricators, and utilizing any kind of help means there are going to be more layers of translation taking place. The last couple of years it’s mostly just been me in the studio and that means the approach to making art becomes a lot more creative because I have to figure out how to work around my limited skill set. So a lot of the materials and processes are actually just solutions to a problem about how to effectively realize my idea.
For a while I was taking a lot of rideshares and getting into conversations with the drivers about being an artist. The drivers would always ask me what mediums I work in and I usually respond “painting, sculpture, and video”–always in that order. I think a big part of the projects I make is installation, even though I’m not sure I feel super comfortable describing myself as an installation artist. But to even zoom out more–I really just think of myself as someone who makes images, and that’s really my main focus. This is in line with what I’ve said before about my website (Parker.sex) being my masterwork. Everything I make usually starts as a Photoshop file, but the Photoshop files are almost always translated into some other form, so no one ever gets to see them. That was one of my favorite things about this 10,000 image NFT project I just did (there was also an option to redeem each image as an oil painting made in a Chinese painting village). It felt super raw to me to have my Photoshop images be the art–the most unmediated straight from my head to the viewer.
It’s not important that there is a personal connection, it just usually happens that way. When people ask me what my art is about I usually just describe it as “the things around me.” My work is very quotidian. Most of the time I find any kind of art practice with an attached thesis boring and predictable.
For so long I avoided doing interviews or having press releases for my shows because I was trying to avoid any kind of language attached to my work, but then for some reason I felt compelled to write a text for my “PPP” show in 2020. My original idea when I began writing was to try and make something that was text only–a mutable format in its presentation and in a stylistic way, completely un-visual in comparison to the work I’m known for making. I was thinking of language as a medium I hadn’t really worked in. So yes, I think of these texts as artworks. The texts are like the software equivalent of a “backend” to the objects I make. I hate writing, so the process is always difficult for me. Currently I’ve started something like seven different essays that are just sitting in Google drive waiting to be finished. One day I’m going to finish all these essays, compile them in a book, and someone will be able to go through the book and read a text on each of the projects I’ve done. That’s the goal anyways, which right now seems incredibly daunting.
