September 18 – November 13, 1999
The Los Angeles based artist installed several large scale photographs, approximately nine feet tall, and similarly-sized grid of small drawings based on a series of 29-year-old paintings-in-progress. Although considered a painter for the convenience of conversation and classification, Parks is not merely multi-media, but rather, media-less. His paintings, are always reforming, (becoming sculptural, becoming performative), utilizing paint, and yet as a result of perpetual “becoming” are never anything other than that process of becoming. Invested in how he chooses to make art as much as what he makes, Parks approaches decision making as a type of media, which along with his other equipment and materials, create enunciative residue of a life-practice. Parks’ new photographs represent an addition to an ongoing body of work rather than a distinct departure. For Parks, even the self-defining body of the photographs (process-as-image-as-object), do not constitute completion: They are subject to the same alterations and continuations as the rest of his oeuvre.
Formally the photographs are indescribable. What is important or interesting in the works is not what you can see, but how you come about seeing them. They possess an indistinct visceral quality that prompts the viewer to consider what it is these images might be; to curiously look for evidence of what “it” the images have recorded. Parks’ work requires forgetting how to look at art, in order to participate in it.
