Curator Joerg Barnasch is proud to present ICONS, a solo exhibition of 100 portraits by Los Angeles based photographic artist Parker Day. The images of ICONS burst forth from the seamy underbelly of life in an explosion of lurid technicolor with a cast of characters played by club kids, internet personalities, and self-professed freaks. The un-retouched grit and grain of 35mm film packages fantastical content in palpable reality. Identity, and our ability to shape how we’re seen and in turn who we are, is central to the work. It’s communicated through costuming, symbols, and the emotional language of color, to connect in an intuitive and direct way that transcends artifice.
Influenced by comic book and advertising aesthetics, Day uses kitsch and nostalgia as a foundation of familiarity to build upon. Growing up in her dad’s comic book store, it was covers by R. Crumb and Charles Burns that most captured her young imagination. Never daring to read these forbidden adult comics, she’d instead invent stories about the colorful characters found on their covers. Day sees her portrait subjects in much the same way; filled with power and mystery.
Parker Day photographed ICONS from July, 2015 to November, 2016 in Los Angeles and NYC. Images from the series have been featured in Vogue Italia, The New Yorker, Juxtapoz, Vice, i-D, and Dazed. Solo exhibitions of ICONS have been presented at Superchief Gallery in both Los Angeles and NYC, as well as at Screaming Sky Gallery in Portland, OR. Parker Day will be present at the Peyer Fine Art opening and will be signing her ICONS book, published by Not A Cult, which will be available for purchase.
I seek out the kind of people you want by your side when the world ends; the indomitable ones that are tough like cockroaches and can't be squashed.
Gallery
