HELM Solo Art Exhibition #2
John Parot’s work is primarily situated within the mediums of drawing, painting, and installation. His drawings, usually comprised of a striking color palette including neon, hot pink, deep red, and blues, often feature floating faces, donned with lips, eyes, and hairdos appropriated from porn and fashion magazines, which are then overspread in pen with web-like designs, connoting tribal ornamentation such as textiles and tattoos. In Endless Stare, over forty pair...
HELM Solo Art Exhibition #2
John Parot’s work is primarily situated within the mediums of drawing, painting, and installation. His drawings, usually comprised of a striking color palette including neon, hot pink, deep red, and blues, often feature floating faces, donned with lips, eyes, and hairdos appropriated from porn and fashion magazines, which are then overspread in pen with web-like designs, connoting tribal ornamentation such as textiles and tattoos. In Endless Stare, over forty pairs of disembodied eyes in various colors and fabrics from disco dresses and shirts to sad, satin pillowcases form an immersive installation. The eyes confront, but also surreptitiously leer at the viewer and become, to borrow from Donald Preziosi, “templates for the composition of our interpersonal selves.” Parot’s work straddles the fantastical and meditations on more earthly and carnal subjects: his work often ponders desire and questions notions of identity as it is constructed through gender, ritual practice, habits, and gay/cultural traditions.
Parot’s work for the HELM series is all about the stare, the leer, and longing. Staring and looking are actions that have been central to gay male culture throughout the decades. Glances in parks and the streets marked the beginning. The emergence of the male physique magazine in the early 60's provided a different medium to satisfy the furtive gaze. The 70's & 80's brought the stare to over the top porn films. Currently the gay stare is everywhere on the internet with tumblr blogs devoted to specific types of men. And then there are the personal phones with cameras and specific sites which enable you to cruise and view photos anywhere. In the words of Parot, “We do what they did and future men will do it as well. We stare.”
John Parot’s Endless Stare is the second solo exhibition in the HELM Series that runs through February 2014 curated by Lara Bullock, Independent Curator and Doctoral Candidate in the program of Art History, Theory, & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego.
Artist Bio: Los Angeles based Artist John Parot was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1970. He has a B.F.A. from Northern Illinois University and a M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. John has exhibited all over the United States with artwork shown at Bellwether in Brooklyn, Jack Hanley in San Francisco, Locust Projects in Miami, and galleries in New York, L.A, Chicago, Dallas and D.C. Currently he is represented in Chicago with the gallery Western Exhibitions. In 2002 John was chosen to participate in Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art 12x12 exhibition series. His work has been written about in the New Yorker, Time Out Chicago, Art on Paper and has received various online reviews. He is a recipient of a full scholarship from Skowhegan and in 2004 he received grants from the Illinois Art Council and Artadia.
In addition to artworks his designs have been featured on business logos, T-shirts, album covers and in 2002 he was commissioned by Mini Cooper to design a limited edition rooftop for their signature car. More Recently you can see his original design on the cover of Penguin’s reissue of the book “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells. This image was featured on the Bravo T.V. show “Work of Art, the Next Great Artist.”
http://johnparot.com/
