Nick Parker is not a hoarder. Nick Parker keeps everything. If these two statements seem inherently at odds, that’s all right. The Brooklyn-based artist has a way with contradictions, a knack for making ideas coalesce when, taken at face value, they shouldn’t.
Parker’s work exists in the space between interpretation and intention, straddling the line between its own finished object-hood and its narrative as a work in progress — or, in the artist’s own parlance, its moment of utility versus its actualization as an art object. A graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art, Parker has been working steadily since 2009 to refine a materials-driven, process-based approach to making. His vases are composed of cement that he pigments, layers, and sands until it starts to resemble some hyperactive version of linoleum. His grander ideas typically end up as “paintings,” made from paint and paint-like materials embedded with scraps and layered on top of a substrate, then sanded down. Forty of those were on display at his last solo show, Amerigo Ferrari: The Golden Body [of America]’s Last Meal’s Lobster Bisque,for which he had some 150 to choose from, all stored at home. “They really stack up,” he says. That home, for the time being, is an East Williamsburg apartment that reflects the constant churning of ideas that defines Parker’s practice, in which he seeks out value in that which is discarded, done, or spent. He utilizes scraps from his day job as a woodworker as well as offcuts and donations from neighboring artists and makers. It could seem a bit relentless if Parker weren’t so methodical in his execution, so fluidly dedicated to his craft that it hardly seems like work at all, just the constant iterating and reiterating of a nagging suspicion that maybe there’s more to the material world than meets the eye.
“I like to keep things around,” says Parker, whose live-work space presents its own set of unique challenges to the creative process. “There are more limitations this way, which is kind of good.”
Parker hand-crafted all of the shelving in his space. “In general, I don’t buy any art supplies,” he notes, instead using found supplies and mixing his own pigments. In Parker’s world, everything from powdered iron, mahogany dust, tape shavings, the cut-off heads of nails, and spray paint chips act as “paint.”
“I wouldn’t put things away if I had space,” admits Parker, who keeps a tarp on the floor to catch cement and chips of paint, which he refers to as “offcuts.” They’re all usable materials and Parker likes them to remain visible in his work.
Parker’s raw material. His materials-driven process has evolved over the years. “[At one point] I was building differently dyed or pigmented layers of cement scraps and other ‘inclusions’ onto bottles or cans, and then sanding and cutting them down and polishing the layers. I then moved on to using the same process on a styrofoam form that is later dissolved. The difference is that in the earlier vases there is a bottle or can embedded within the cement, whereas later it’s just made of cement, usually sealed inside with wax.”
Parker started out building cement into bottles and cans, but moved away from that “substrate” and now does freestanding creations carved from molds. Concrete is not supposed to hold water but he seals it with wax to make the vessels functional.
A Perrier bottle, which could have been a potential found “core” for a vessel, stands amongst finished vases.
Aluminum offcuts from a CNC router salvaged from Parker’s day job — he works at a shop that does window displays — sit atop his desk.
A jumble of “string” in one corner reveals itself upon closer inspection to be ¼-inch lines of masking tape in a rainbow gradient. The Aloe plant is carved out of blue foam (not an artwork); next to it sits a carved foam “sandwich” wrapped in a piece of tinfoil painted with the American flag, exhibited in Parker’s 2014 solo show at Old Room, “Amerigo Ferrari: The Golden Body [of America]’s Last Meal’s Lobster Bisque.”
A live Aloe plant in one corner of the space (named Ezra Pound) acts as an artful foil to its blue foam cousin (The Ghost of Ezra Pound.)
“The things that I’m working on are all connected, and it becomes apparent when they’re grouped together.”
“They’re just kind of hanging out there,” says Parker of his tools—none of which he actually uses.
Parker has always been incorporating “things” into his work that don’t necessarily belong and aren’t traditionally used in the way that he uses them; a lamp shade Parker made of epoxy has a piece of a CD in it, a coke can forms the base of a sculpture.
“All my work is kinda slow,” says Parker. “If I have an idea it usually sits for awhile until I figure out how to make it.”
Parker in his live-work space.
Parker’s landlord keeps raising the rent so he plans to move to Ridgewood in June and have a separate studio.
Environmentalism is a recurring thread in Parker’s work, though it may not be obvious at first sight. It often comes down to a question of display—how do you create a room that has “finished” works and “overflow” works, and what can the artist do to highlight the tension between done and undone?
“[It’s] a mystery to me,” says Parker of his triangular lamp, which took on its distinctive shape seemingly of its own accord. The shade is layers of tinted epoxy, “and there’s a piece of a cd in there.”
Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
Last month, when the watch brand Mondaine asked for a peek into a day in the life of a Sight Unseen editor, I dragged our trusty photographer Paul Barbera all around the Brooklyn enclave popping in on our friends and shooting future studio visits for the site, from Workaday Handmade to Confettisystem.
Thaddeus Wolfe's Assemblage vases looked mysterious enough when he debuted them in 2011, first for sale with Matter and then with a special edition for Chicago's Volume Gallery — we'd never seen glass before that paired the shape and surface texture of rocks and minerals with amazing fades of opaque color. When we asked him to describe his process to us, it turned out that it was relatively easy to grasp, if not execute: He blew the vessels into faceted plaster-and-silicon molds. His newest take on the series — the Unsurfacing collection for Volume, on view as of tonight — looks even more complicated, layered with fragmented geometric patterns and contrasting colors.
