Above: Katherine Parker (left) with sister Anna Parker (right) in front of work 127 Studies, at Potential Images Exhibition, Kamil Gallery, La Jolla, CA.Biography
Originally from rural Missouri, Katherine Parker now resides and works in San Diego, California. She graduated from the University of California- San Diego in 2018 with two Bachelor’s degrees in Visual Art: one in Visual Art History/Theory/Criticism and one in Visual Art Studio. Since graduating, Katherine has worked and exhibited in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Katherine is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of California- Santa Barbara.
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Artist Statement
My studio practice explores theories in the field of cognitive science. I utilize distortion, plasticity of definition, and misinterpretation to cope with complex concepts and bring them into a tangible, physical space. My work investigates the separate roles of the human conscious and the subconscious influence individual perception and spatial interpretation. I am intrigued by the fragility of one’s objective experience. That is, when faced with excessive visual and subconscious information, the brain must filter out certain information in its attempt to understand its environment. I visualize the indefiniteness of embodied consciousness by removing and/or altering mechanically-recorded information and project this altered information back into a physical space.
I began with an examination of the cognitive disorder, hemispatial neglect, a condition where the brain compensates for unilaterally missing visual information by filling in the gaps to project its own reality. As I continue to survey this concept, I’m compelled to explore the other realities recognized by our subconscious, specifically the authenticity of muscle memory and the notion of an “internalized other.” By conceptually isolating the subconscious processes of the body into the role of an “internalized other,” I hope to explore my relationship to consumption and digestion, internalized trauma, and the mind’s embodied duality of the conscious and subconscious. In my artistic process, I think of biological neural cognition as mechanically reproducible. This concept is congruent with current models of artificial neural networks designed to synthesize deep learning for research in artificial intelligence. I incorporate research in cognitive science that suggests the human brain, which I refer to as consciousness, possesses plasticity to overcome and artificially introduce information to make sense of an individual's surroundings. Because the brain has the ability to impose artificial information onto external perception, human biological consciousness is inseparable from misinformation and thus unreliable. My conceptual model of this embodied duality allows me to artistically assess the role of the subconscious in human perception. My series on spatial positioning examines how the separate roles of the subconscious and conscious influence processing and filtering excessive visual information. This topic translates to wider political, social, and economic interpretations with the rapid increase of information in society and how this information is easily manipulated, falsified, or simply lost amongst the excess. With this interpretation, my work would be interested in the frustration of filtering out a critical understanding while navigating a distrust of the image itself. Materially, I work primarily with installations that sometimes include projections, digital drawings, photographic manipulations, egg tempera paint on canvas, and fiber work. |