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
Katherine Parker moved to San Diego, CA in 2015 from rural mid-Missouri to pursue her BA in Visual Art: Studio and Visual Art: History/Theory/Criticism at the University of California- San Diego. Since graduating in 2018, Katherine has worked and exhibited in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
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Artist Statement
For my artistic practice I am interested in the imperfect representations left after the excessiveness of visual information is removed: such as the blank spots in reality that human perception never really sees, and how exactly to visualize this phenomenon. I’m interested in the excessive information provided by mechanical process of recording and their correlation to actual experience and memory. I am utilizing the area where these processes fail in their ability to portray the objective experience, thus fabricating memories/experiences based on information that would have been lost or, more than likely, gone unnoticed.
I started exploring this topic utilizing the reality the body recognizes, specifically the authenticity of muscle memory and the things the body can remember that active consciousness is unaware of. I am interested in replicating authentic experience by removing all fabricated noise then imposing notions of the body onto an imperfect and often inaccurate representation that speaks to the messy indefiniteness of human perception. For this I am using images produced from studies on brain disorders, specifically hemispheric neglect (127 Studies) where only portions of the drawings are completed by the patient’s hand because the brain of these stroke victims will naturally fill in the rest of the information that is lost is a severed hemispheral connection. I recreate messy, highly expressionistic drawing of these flowers and fill in the information with digital drawing projected back onto the plane. The distance and unfilled information are used to replicate the notion of the subconsciousness, the blank spots in perception. I am naturally drawn to seeing the artist's hand in the making of the work, specifically the unique irrefutable documentation it provides of the artist's body: both accounting for the time and the space the body occupied while making it. In cognitive science there is a term I find oddly perfect, spatial positioning, which refers to the body’s ability to realize space. For me this space is both about the representation of space in the work but the physical account for the space the body was in. In this way I am very interested in the physicality of perception and am drawn to authentic forms of representation as a means of understanding personal experience, which is what led me to my fascination with images produced from scientific studies of brain disorders. Currently I am exploring the excessive information itself and the inability to focus/understand where we are in relation to our surroundings. How our ability to process our surroundings is made impossible as it is constantly pounded with excessive information. As a result seeing is essentially slowing forgetting or misinterpreting what is going on around one’s body. I believe 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, falcified, or simply lost amongst the excess. In this interpretation, my work would be interested in the frustration of filtering out an understanding while navigating a distrust of the image itself. |