Parker Ito is an American artist whose work primarily consists of painting, installation, and web based imagery. His internet-influenced approach to art results in large bodies of work produced in short amounts of time. He has exhibited in the United States, and internationally. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Video Parker Ito
Life
Parker Ito was born in 1986 in Long Beach, California, and was raised there. When Ito was younger he acted, and sang on television. Before becoming a professional artist he aspired to become a professional skateboarder and held a job painting oil derricks in Los Angeles.
Maps Parker Ito
Art practice
Persona
Ito functions under many pseudonyms such as Deke McLelland Two, Creamy Dreamy, and Parker Cheeto, among others. He uses these for different bodies of work as a way of complicating authorship. His practice aims to challenge authorship and authenticity in many ways. Parker has said that many of his past interviews were delivered by someone operating in his place over email.
Ito has a unique persona that he enacts in photographs, and videos in which he is seen wearing high-end designer suits or skateboarding through his studio. His personal photographs are often manipulated to have further graphics added to them and deemed new works of art.
Production
Ito's working style involves hiring paid assistants to produce works. He insists on paying them a fair wage and allows for the produced works to be made in the style of the hired hand. This strategy was used in Ito's body of work The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet, a project created while he was still attending California College of the Arts in Oakland. For this work, a popular stock photo which features a young girl wearing a backpack on a college campus was manually reproduced and manipulated through painting in several different styles and interpretations. The lack of a cohesive visual style has become synonymous with Ito's practice.
The use of hired hands was also notably used to produce the works shown at White Cube gallery in London for his exhibition Part 2: Nora Berman, Blackwidow LA, Parker Cheeto, Carey Garris, Justin John Greene, Celia Hollander, Daniel Lane, Lee Marshall and Orion Martin: Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem), 2014. In this show, all of his assistants received credit as artists within the exhibition, leading people to believe it was a group exhibition.
Conceptual Concerns
Ito has said that he is not concerned about maintaining ownership over ideas or stylistic decisions in a period where information sharing is ubiquitous. He is a champion of the Internet and believes that the spreading of ideas is the primary purpose of its existence.
The primary concerns of his art practice are authorship and authenticity, technical reproduction, professionalization and corporatization of art, the affect of overwhelm, and the role and influence of the Internet on contemporary culture.
Critic Reception
While Ito has received some positive reception - Chris Kraus called a 2015 exhibition "a stunning, vertiginous private museum multiplied hundreds of times" - other critics have been less positive. ArtReview described a 2014 exhibition as "immensely boring... so much celebrated meaninglessness."
Career
Parker Ito is represented by Château Shatto, a Los Angeles-based art gallery co-owned by Nelson Harmon and Liv Barrett, Ito's relationship partner and dealer, and Team Gallery in New York. Ito has exhibited internationally, including at The Headquarters, Zurich; Stadium, New York; IMO Gallery, Copenhagen; New Galerie, Paris; White Cube, London, and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. In addition to his extensive use of assistants, Ito has collaborated with other artists, such as Body by Body (Melissa Sachs, Cameron Soren), Chris Coy, Caitlin Denny, Jon Rafman, Tabor Robak, Micah Schippa, John Transue, and Artie Vierkant.
Art Market
Parker Ito was one of 30 or so emerging artists that are associated with Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz met Ito in 2009, alongside Jon Rafman and Artie Vierkant, saying "In all of these guys, I identified the makings of a movement." Simchowitz claims he was Ito's first client, purchasing a painting from him when the artist was 22 for $750, and flipping it for $1500.
Ito's work experienced a rapid increase in value, peaking in February 2014 at $93,594, significantly higher than the high estimate of $25,000.. In July 2014 a work sold for $80,000, but in the year after that, his auction results averaged $30,000 per or had works unsold. More recently, his works at auction have mostly had high estimates around or under $10,000, and have gone as low as 2,700 GBP, which was under the low estimate of 4,000 GBP.
During the period leading up to his 2014 auction high, Ito's relationship with Simchowitz became an art-world controversy. Currently, Ito is actively distancing himself from Simchowitz
References
External links
- Parker Ito's Website
- Parker Ito's Youtube Channel
- Parker Ito, Château Shatto
- The Agony and the Ecstasy, Stadium Gallery
- Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem), ArtReview
- I Like the Direct Experience of Documentation: A Conversation with Artie Vierkant and Parker Ito, ArtPulse
- Saltz on Stefan Simchowitz, the Greatest Art-Flipper of Them All, Vulture
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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