Ryan Parker
About the Artist
Ryan Parker (b. 1989, Twentynine Palms, CA) is a lens based artist and documentarian based in Bozeman, MT. He was raised on military installations across the US and Japan until the age of 13. These early years became integral to the subject matter within Parker’s lens based practice. His work is concerned with the altered landscape, specifically the relationship between industrial standardization and economic factors which lead to upheaval in small communities. His large format photographs document the hinterland, the space subtly forgotten.
Artist Statement
The foundation of every system is the creation of a logical ordering of things. When land is subdivided it creates a system of efficiencies, a logic for where objects (to include people) need to exist for the growth of capital to continue. Human-altered landscapes present the culmination of these efficiencies’ whilst weighting them against the totality of our cultural ethics, values, and beliefs. Within my practice is a meditation on living within the built environment, with its average and ordinary aesthetics building up the anxiety between human and non-human objects. The anti-monumentality, with which images and objects interact to persuade us towards acceptance of an efficient society is prolific. It bleeds into our quotidian environment, through billboards, infrastructure beautification, and reclamation sites transformed into leisure spaces. Using a balance of large format photography, video, installation, and interactive public sculpture, I create works which reveal the quiet and constant anxiety embodied in the ordering of our landscape.