Laura Parker ‘Imagining Infinity’ at SPARC Gallery

 

The South Pasadena Arts Council (SPARC) is pleased to present the exhibition LAURA PARKER – IMAGINING INFINITY at SPARC Gallery, located at the South Pasadena Chamber of Commerce on Mission Street.  Sam Mellon and Claudia Bohn-Spector of the South Pasadena curatorial design firm MICRONAUT organized the exhibition.

 Laura Parker’s work engages multiples processes, including photography, drawing, and printmaking.  For her exhibition at SPARC Gallery, Parker selected examples from her “Rubbings” and “Photo-Drawings” series, which explore abstract patterns, tracings, and movements of lights against neutral backgrounds.  Her work, simultaneously “real” and evocative beyond its physical manifestations, engages the concept of infinity. As Parker notes, “each rubbed image starts as a circle, and in some way, ends as a circle.

There is a ‘print’ (the physical rubbing) on top of a print (the photograph). One picks up where the other leaves off; there is no discerinable end.”  For her abstract “photo-drawings” she used the planet Jupiter as a point source of light to ‘draw’ with. Focusing on ‘endlessness’ and using a slow, multi-second shutter speed, she moved her camera, trained on the tiny, but bright point that is Jupiter, in a series of gestural shapes that equally evoke the intimate and timeless, allowing viewers to question perceived notions of time and space.

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 Laura Parker’s photography, animation and installations have been shown at museums, galleries and alternative spaces across the United States and abroad. She earned her BFA, Magna cum Laude, from UCLA and her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, CA. She currently lives in Altadena and teaches digital and analog photography from home, where she maintains a darkroom, and at the Armory Center for the Arts.