Laura Parnes is contemporary American artist who creates non-linear narratives that engage strategies of film and

video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...

and blur the lines between storytelling conventions and experimentation. Her work is often episodic, references pop culture, female stereotypes, history and the anxiety of influence. She was the co-director of

Momenta Art Momenta Art was an artist-run, not-for-profit organization and gallery, which from its founding in 1986Fensterstock, Ann. Art on the Block : Tracking the New York Art World from Soho to the Bowery, Bushwick and Beyond. First edition. New York, NY ...

with Eric Heist and helped relaunch the not-for-profit exhibition space in New York City; at first as a nomadic space and then as a permanent space in

Williamsburg, Brooklyn Williamsburg is a Neighborhoods in Brooklyn, neighborhood in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn, bordered by Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Greenpoint to the north; Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Bedford–Stuyvesant to the s ...

. She continued to her involvement as a Board Chair until 2011. Parnes received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and lives and works in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, NY. She currently teaches in MFA departments at MICA, Parsons, and SVA.

Works and critical reception

Laura Parnes' latest work, County Down, is an episodic, digital film investigating a pandemic of psychosis in a gated community that coincides with an adolescent girl's creation of a designer drug. Performers include: Chloe Bass,

Becca Blackwell Becca Blackwell (born 1973/1974) is an American trans actor, performer, and playwright based in New York City. Blackwell's pronoun is the singular they. Their play "They, Themself and Schmerm," has been presented by a number of venues including The ...

, Ellen Cantor, Patty Chang,

Nicole Eisenman Nicole Eisenman (born 1965) is French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial (1995, 20 ...

, Jim Fletcher,

Kate Valk Kate Valk (born March 6, 1957) is a founding member of The Wooster Group, a collective of artists who make new work for the theater. Kate Valk began her work with the group in 1979 while she was a student at New York University's Tisch School of th ...

, Stephanie Vella and Sacha Yanow. The soundtrack and musical arrangements are by Johanna Fateman. ''Blood and Guts in High School'', a 50-minute Parnes video which Chris Kraus called an “extrapolationist reduction” of

Kathy Acker Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 isputed– November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trau ...

’s famous 1978 novel of the same name, builds snippets of the book's original dialogue and text into scripts for theatrical vignettes.

Holland Cotter Holland Cotter is an art critic with ''The New York Times''. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Life and work Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, wh ...

stated “the video is a model of how to bring off an ambitions project with scant resources, and also of how to respect source material while transforming it. Ms. Parnes’s video floats like a shark, forever hovering, but always watching and moving.” Often her work is formally staged and uses dialog sampled from cultural dogma. Her work ''Hollywood Inferno'' is a two-channel installation that refers to our cultural obsession with adolescents. The main protagonist, Sandy, is a candy store clerk who attaches herself to a script writer named Virgil, who promises career contacts and gives her a picaresque tour through cultural hell. She collaborated with Sue de Beer on ''Heidi 2'', the Unauthorized Sequel to Mike Kelley and

Paul McCarthy Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Life McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1945. He studied art at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and later continued ...

’s ''Heidi''. In this feminist, multi-media installation the artists used pop cultural tropes without apology expressing the most primal events through the idiom of sitcoms, video games and splatter films.Moody, Tom. "Double Your Transgression, Double Your Fun, Heidi 2", VERY, Fall, 1999, pp. 16-17, New York, NY

Exhibitions

Laura Parnes' works have been exhibited widely in the United States and worldwide, including: Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece., LOOP Festival, Barcelona, Spain; Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY; Kusthalle Winterhur, Switzerland; Overgaden- Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; iMOCA, Indianapolis, IN; Cinematexas, Austin, TX; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art (1997 Whitney Biennial), NY; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; PSI Contemporary Art Center MoMA, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; and Brooklyn Museum, NY. Her solo exhibitions include: LA> She participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and is a 2013 Solomon R. Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and

Creative Capital Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...

Awardee.

References

External links

Laura Parnes
in th
Video Data BankLaura Parnes's official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parnes, Laura American film directors American women film directors Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women