'The Distancing Project'

At the Manitou Art Center we will have a new show in the First Amendment Gallery with various local and regional artists and a new show in the Hagnauer Gallery called ‘The Distancing Project’ by Gregory Parker.

We will have a wine and beer cash bar.

Gregory Parker Artist Statement:

My work explores memory and time and how they work together to separate the remembered (and misremembered) past from the present and potential futures. We often try to impose a narrative upon events and apply tidy labels to our actual experiences, making our history a story woven from memory and time. But this story can be rich with hopes and dreams, love and loss, and sadly, fear and pain. Much of the imagery I use comes from my own story. But the true purpose of my work is to use multiple layers of imagery, abstraction, and distortion to envoke the recollection of unexpected and authentic memories, thoughts about the present, dreams for the future, or simply an awareness of the passage of time, even when the catalyst appears to be nothing but noise.

I consider my approach to collage, both digital and physical, as the meticulous, sometimes elegant, and occasionally chaotic use of the sacred, profane, mundane, and archetypical. The almost random cutting and pasting of often anachronistic images, detritus, scientific data, fragments of song lyrics, poetry, and clichés, plus text from my personal journals and medical records, make the formative moments of a new piece almost forced on me. By carefully controlling everything from that point on, I try to find the correct geometry, scan the hidden pixels, and identify the right contrasts (both literally and figuratively) to create something visually interesting and exciting. I want to use this process to make the trivial and autobiographical into something worthwhile and universal. The same techniques were employed during the Distancing project, which I completed between March 23, 2020 and July 24, 2021.

As the COVID-19 pandemic developed and the normal rhythms of my life disappeared, so did my own sense of time and memory. While social distancing and working from home, I assigned myself a small project: create something new every morning in 10–15 minutes as both a “warm-up” exercise for the day and a tool to help me keep track of the passage time. Each of the 489 digital collages tells a brief story by pulling images from the collection I have been curating for 30 years (and was now reorganizing during the pandemic).

Some days, my work was scientifically and/or emotionally related to the pandemic, while on others, it would randomly use the first few images that got my attention or memories that were lingering. On several occasions, I thought both the pandemic and this project were ending, but this hope only turned out to be half true. To view the entire project in its original formats, please visit instagram.com/d1574nc1n9.