Anna Parkina

There is a sense of the psychogeographic in the work of Russian artist Anna Parkina. Her performances, collages and drawings freely overlap, re-invent, and mutate diverse genres including Constructivism and the American mafia flick. Like someone exploring California with a map of Belarus, it is Pakina’s fearless imagination that acts as her North Star. This sensibility can be attributed in part to an artistic life spent in motion, one that commenced shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, Parkina, still in her twenties, has since lived between her native Moscow and Paris, studied in California and shown in Berlin, all the while collecting and overlapping ideologies, geographies and cultures into a highly personalized multi-dimensional montage.

Long time ago they discovered Corn in the Buble Town, now they create a big movie where every body can play a part, big or small.

For her first solo exhibition in New York, Anna Parkina presents Corn Rush the movie II- DARK ROOM. Using new drawings, silk-screens, collages and performance she stages the gallery as a kind of pre- production/screening room. The exhibition, in part a sequel to a 2004 performance at Art Center (where Parkina sprouted husks of corn out from under her spandex dress), continues her use of Cinema as a proxy for discovery. In this version, her own immigrant/emigrant experience is filtered through the New York mafia genre with Don CornyOne in the role of leader, or lead character. Equal parts Brando and Stalin, the Don or “Daddy One” is an omni-present, poster habitating morph and the summation of Parkina’s approach to illustrating the psychology of montage. Works like Knock-Knock (2005) reiterate this focus on mutability. The keyhole shaped collage, which depicts dual images of the artist in geisha-spy mode, makes literal her looking glass game. In Parkina’s DARK ROOM, east and west, left and right, viewer and artwork are given double-lives, overlapped and interchanged until the only constant is the psychogeographic terrain of the artist’s imagination.

Anna Parkina was born in Moscow in 1979. She has studied at the L’Ecole des Beaux-Art, Paris and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Her most recent solo exhibition was at Galerie Meerettich, Berlin.

Pressetext

Anna Parkina
Corn Rush The Movie II / Dark Room