Work
The challenge is to make the idea translate no matter what medium or size.
Painting
Decisions are based on the memory of a source yet in response to other, previous marks. A veritable negotiation, like some sort of international treaty.
What do you want people to contemplate when they look at your work?
Big things. I like to think that a painting about ascension can actually tip your way toward some sort of ascension.
Drawing
I started making these line drawings after a class demonstration I did on pen an ink. I love both the meditative aspect of the repetition as much as how they challenge the optics in a self focusing camera!
I don’t want to tell you what the narrative is, but I want to put things in there that you, the viewer, can find or imagine for yourself.
Collage
Scouring local resale shops and thrift stores, I mine vintage popular books and magazines for pictures and print ephemera related to the development of modern America. I look for familiar-feeling images that relate psychologically to modern experiences of space, and I am particularly interested in images fertile with possibilities for subtle narrative or contextual contradiction.
“With their impeccable modernist furnishings, the spaces present a utopia of design. Yet, they are also dystopian in their untouched and untouchable sterility, portents of what happens when design is not grounded in the body and is instead consumed by aesthetics and concepts.”
—Charmaine Koh, Shotgun Review
"Erik Parra: History by Choice at Eleanor Harwood Gallery"
May 8, 2018