Thinking Globally, Acting Visually
 Elizabeth Fasolino |
(3/19/2008) When Caroline Parker celebrated the opening of her exhibit at the DietzSpace in New York City over the weekend, she wasn’t just putting her most recent paintings and installations on view, she was enacting a ritual of the family business.
Ms. Parker is the daughter of the late Ray Parker, the noted Color Field painter, and, though she has decidedly carved out a niche of her own, the presence of familiar faces provided a link to the past.
“My God, these are the faces that I remember from Indian Wells in the ’70s,” said Denise Parker, the artist’s mother, pointing out such old friends as Jane and Arnold Warwick, Gunnar Theel, and Joan Washburn, the late Mr. Parker’s dealer.
For the artist herself, the evening brought back memories of similar events that she had attended as a child. “I remember climbing on the hanging sculpture mobile outside Elaine Benson’s gallery at my father’s opening,” she said.
Ms. Parker may no longer be treating sculptures as her own personal jungle gym, but she has not lost her sense of fun. Her current show presents a complex set of images that share a visual language, conveying the reality of global community without seeming contrived or pretentious. Elements of foreboding and gloom are leavened by playfulness.
“I had stopped painting for a while when I was in college,” Ms. Parker, a girlish woman in her early 40s with wide brown eyes, said last week at the gallery. “But I wrote a paper about the visual language of Emile Zola’s ‘Germinal’ and the painting of Eduard Manet and it brought me back to painting. So, literature steered me back to painting.”
With the current show of six paintings, a palimpsest of 20 photographs displayed on a monitor, a video installation projected on a waterfall, and an “Open Book” of pastels based on a Web site called “Alive in Baghdad,” Ms. Parker has made a remarkably cohesive visual essay about recurring connections between identity and emotion and landscape.
 A pastel of Adhamiya, a suburb of Baghdad, seen by Ms. Parker on “Alive in Baghdad,” a Web site. “I became aware of the singing of the birds in the background,” she said after listening to the audio from the video. “I recognized them from being out in East Hampton, and I’m trying to understand it on a deeper level.” |
All the work was made during the last five years. Ms. Parker said the work had been displayed chronologically. The paintings at the entry are an intimate examination of her backyard, the land along the Hudson River below 23rd Street.
“In 2003 I began working on the waterscapes,” she said, which are interpretative paintings of industrial buildings, abandoned piers, and decaying creosote pilings. “I took a small skiff from Chelsea Piers. We’d lived downtown my whole life and we’d cross the West Side Highway, and, being in East Hampton, with dad checking the lobster pots, I have always had a fascination with the tide line. The pilings for me are what started the work. They are markers of time. The tide in the Hudson was time.”
In “Waters Edge 2,” Ms. Parker compressed a series of photographs, altering the original scale and shifting recognizable landscapes, such as the Empire State Building, into skewed montages of familiar landscapes.
“I’d been developing a process of layers of color, and the structure of the layers reinforces the layers of the compositions,” Ms. Parker said. A series of translucent bands unify dissonant elements of scale and perspective, heightening the simple geometric patterns that project, recede, and reflect into a Hollywood version of the usually choppy gray urban water.
In 2004 Ms. Parker visited the exhibit of architectural models for a competition to redesign the site where the World Trade Center had stood. More than 80 architects displayed models at the World Financial Center, and thousands of visitors went to see the exhibit. She took a series of photographs of the visitors, the models, and the interior of the pavilion fronting a marina on the lower Hudson River.
Twenty of the photos have been assembled into a series displayed on a flat screen which loops continuously.
“I couldn’t focus on the myriad images and models so I started focusing on the people,” Ms. Parker said. “I saw the text of lights from a ticker scrolling horizontally at the exhibit, which reinforced the alienation of the people.”
text of lights from a ticker scrolling horizontally at the exhibit, which reinforced the alienation of the people.”
“It is hard for me to speak of this work,” she said, pausing to look at the disparity of scale within the photographs, as well as the juxtapositions of profiles, and random text. “It brings up so many feelings.”
“It’s complex. I thought at the time the language of the graphic announcements was inappropriate.”
“Memorial Plans 5” is a larger-than-life figurative oil painting taken from a photo in the scroll of photos. “There was a strong vertical motif which manifested itself literally when I got home,” Ms. Parker said. It is an eerie evocation of the soaring steel verticals that defined the external metal sheaf of the twin towers.
The lines in the painting punctuate and isolate the silhouetted images. Compositionally the canvas is broken into a series of unequal geometric spaces, defined by variable layers of translucency and reflection, appropriated from reflections on the camera lens, with additional emphasis from swaths of transparent paint.
“I work with the figure and the landscape,” Ms. Parker said. “It’s all about what I’m trying to say. I’ll go in any direction that I need to go into. There was a challenge to this to work from the images. I wanted to keep the brushmarks free and not adhere so strictly to the photos. I was thinking visually in thin layers of paint.”
Ms. Parker said that trying to challenge herself as an artist is something that she learned from her father. “When he felt he was ready to move on, he moved into a different direction. There are so many ways I learned from him, and it’s a joy to have his work in the studio with me. It keeps me close and it’s wonderful.”
She consciously works to synchronize her visual language with her perceptions of the world. “It’s of particular importance,” she said. And so when she learned about the “Alive in Baghdad” Web site (www.aliveinbaghdad.org) she was inspired to translate what the images of people living and working in Baghdad meant to her.
She began an ongoing homage, through a series of pastels, evoking an imaginary and empathetic imaginary dialogue with the people on the Web site.
“I want to align my brush more with my senses,” she said. “I watched the videos over and over and listened to the sounds, watched the light changes, and it evolved into a clearer sense of the place.”
“The language is so beautiful and the films are so moving. I’d hit ‘play’ with one hand and draw with the other. I feel compelled to tell the stories, but I can’t possibly tell them better than the films themselves. We don’t really hear from the citizens of Iraq, so I see it as a conduit to the people, and hope people will go to the site and gain a deeper understanding. When I started doing these drawings I got dizzy. The next time it didn’t happen.”
The culmination of the show is “August 4, Central Park,” a video installation projected against a waterfall. Ms. Parker filmed the polar bears playing behind the plexiglass enclosure at the zoo.
“What I didn’t expect was that the audio of people wondering about the bear would be interwoven in the moment of people wondering about the bear so that the piece becomes almost interactive. It’s a layering I didn’t anticipate.” Ms. Parker left the random snippets of dialogue in the finished piece.
The visual impact of the video is luminous — three layers of reflection intermingling, while polar bears swoop across the screen, tentatively longing for contact with the audience, but retreating back to their lairs.
The show at DietzSpace can be seen through June 30. It will be part of TOAST (Tribeca Open Artists Studio Tour), a three-day event from April 25 to April 28. Additional information about the show and studio tour can be found at the gallery Web site, www.dietzspace.org.