Parker Ito

Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Stadium, Parker Ito: The Agony and the Ecstasy, 2012

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the reflective nature of the surface. The catalogue illustration only represents one of the multiple appearances of this work, which depends on lighting and the viewer's standpoint. Please refer to the e-catalogue for alternative views. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are a few very minor and unobtrusive irregularities to the surface, in places, which are only visible under raking light and close inspection.
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With its highly reflective and textured surface endlessly shifting dependent on the viewer’s vantage point, The Agony and the Ecstasy brings into question the limits of visual experience and our relation to recorded, documented reality.

Los Angeles-based Internet artist Parker Ito aims at interrogating the groundings of and deconstructing the still-standing antagonism between online persona, art, experience and real life. In an age of permanent connectiveness, the frontier between the physical and the virtual has been permeabilised, and we exist in the interstitial, limbo-like spaces of presence between realities unencumbered by the tangible.

As a limitless network of shared, un-hierarchised information, the web became the primary source via which we access and experience art objects. It is with that in mind that Parker Ito created the body of work The Agony and the Ecstasy: because of their very nature, these paintings are un-documentable. Water and paint is sprayed on coated 3M Scotchlite which, when photographed, and subsequently posted on social networks by gallery-goers, takes various and unique forms because of their glaring surface. “Multiplicity is an important part to the project – a gallery viewer could see these objects in person and think “wow these are extremely beautiful” and the works would just be reduced to pretty things on a wall. Someone could see a low res cell phone pic on Facebook that is extremely blown out and actually have no understanding at all of the formal characteristics of these works. So these objects both reject and accept their own beauty. The most interesting way to experience them is to live with them” (the artist in conversation with Courtney Malik, DIS Magazine, New York 2012, online resource).