Spandau Parks
18 September through 13 November 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.