Word: parkerisms
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...ingenuity. A number of her found objects make this particularly clear, such as Breath of a Librarian, a deflated black balloon found in the reading room of the British Library. Works like this might lead us to wonder whether collector, rather than sculptor, might be a better description for Parker...
...Parker is the consummate pack-rat, collecting and cherishing all kinds of seemingly worthless objects--rocks, feathers, tarnish rubbings. She combines these materials in ways that are often stunning visually, and, at the same time, she uses them as a means of making associations and narratives. She says that she is intrigued by Freud's theory of the unconscious and has made a photogram of a white feather that came from the pillow on the infamous couch. The feather is associated with slumber, slumber with dreams, dreams with the unconscious and then we're back again at Freud. Parker often...
...best of Parker's work, like "Room for Margins," depend on such effective combinations of the visual and the narrative aspects of her art. The most memorable have as much visual as verbal wit, and can stand alone without the extra information, the story, imparted by the caption. A visit to a firearm factory yielded two Colt 45 revolvers, arrested mid-production and polished, so that they look soft and immature, almost harmless. Visually, the pair of handguns look like two Nefertitis moving in for a kiss...
...Parker's best tricks are her acts of levitation. The ICA is filled with the slender threads by which Parker hangs these pieces in a permanent state of suspense. In a piece called Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson), the charred remains of a London factory fire are hung a foot above ground by barely visible metal wires. The lumps of blackened charcoal, some suspended from their center of mass, some askew, are arranged with the larger pieces on the bottom, getting smaller towards the top. The living fire resides in incinerated stasis; the figurative and literal, the pun and the sculptural...
Thirty Pieces of Silver, a Biblical reference to Judas's bounty for his betrayal of Christ is another of Parker's hanging pieces. A cascade of fishing line tenuously holds, in a five-by-six array, thirty pools of steamrolled silverware, from forks to platters to trombones. A slight rumbling from the Green Line below and the room is awash with music. A spiritual experience indeed--it's a near miracle that all those pieces manage to hang without tangling...