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Conceptual artist, Derek Parks employs a spare, precise visual language to explore identity, personal history, culture and sexuality. This selection represents 15-years spanning portraiture, performance, commissions, installation and photography. Parks' densely layered work encompasses kitsch, surrealism, the archaeological and the archival to challenge notions of identity and personal history.
2011
I am a genre-oriented, conceptually based installation artist.
My work deals with social fragmentation, stricture, and structure viewed against inherently elastic personal histories: an examination of the fluid nature of identity, truths relayed by an unreliable narrator but evaluated against hard fact. The work is driven by my need to seek and create structure and by the concept of identity as a complex act of self-invention.
Through unlimited settings, characters and media I investigate constructs of identity. Through a diagrammatical approach, I examine possibilities exposed by the processes and results of overcoming specific personal/societal issues. These concepts are laid out in fragments with all their "empty" spaces and silences intact- a reference to the dubious integrity of a mass-media driven society. I cast traditional modes of portraiture and landscape painting, photography and appropriation as diagrams- or misrepresentations- using their familiarity as an aid to navigating complex theory. The use of disparate modes/materials relates to my beliefs about mistaken, or distorted "fact" and personal history.
The concept of identity as a complex act of self-invention: identity is merely a choice made by the individual as a mask to pass into/out of society, or as a defense/safe structure within society.
The function of my work is to contemplate the present as a conduit to understanding and articulating where we are now, and to inventing the future and maps to navigate it.
Conceptual artist, Derek Parks employs a spare, precise visual language to explore identity, personal history, culture and sexuality. This selection represents 15-years spanning portraiture, performance, commissions, installation and photography. Parks' densely layered work encompasses kitsch, surrealism, the archaeological and the archival to challenge notions of identity and personal history.
2011
I am a genre-oriented, conceptually based installation artist.
My work deals with social fragmentation, stricture, and structure viewed against inherently elastic personal histories: an examination of the fluid nature of identity, truths relayed by an unreliable narrator but evaluated against hard fact. The work is driven by my need to seek and create structure and by the concept of identity as a complex act of self-invention.
Through unlimited settings, characters and media I investigate constructs of identity. Through a diagrammatical approach, I examine possibilities exposed by the processes and results of overcoming specific personal/societal issues. These concepts are laid out in fragments with all their "empty" spaces and silences intact- a reference to the dubious integrity of a mass-media driven society. I cast traditional modes of portraiture and landscape painting, photography and appropriation as diagrams- or misrepresentations- using their familiarity as an aid to navigating complex theory. The use of disparate modes/materials relates to my beliefs about mistaken, or distorted "fact" and personal history.
The concept of identity as a complex act of self-invention: identity is merely a choice made by the individual as a mask to pass into/out of society, or as a defense/safe structure within society.
The function of my work is to contemplate the present as a conduit to understanding and articulating where we are now, and to inventing the future and maps to navigate it.
