Park Life
When it comes to contemporary art, we’re hard-pressed to think of anyone doing interesting landscapes. In fact, when we take photography out of the mix (sorry, Ansel Adams), we can’t remember the last time we saw exciting work in a gallery that included trees, sky and clouds. Clearly, the landscape is in serious need of reviving.
Maria Park might be the artist to do it. Park’s landscapes are spare and sleek, her clouds pieced together like quilt patterns or reminiscent of paint-by-number pictures. There’s also a cold detachment to the work that belies its handmade origins.
“I get the sense that I am looking at the images through a monitor — the images are flat, colorful, glossy and reflective. However, upon closer inspection, one notices that they also have a wonderful tactility to them — they are not as slick and polished as I first thought they would be,” writes Elizabeth Dunbar, curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, where Park’s Strange Passages installation opens Friday.
Art critics frequently herald the end of painting as a medium — then turn around and champion its return. It’s an annoying cycle, one that also leads us to wonder why, with so many technological tools available, Park paints at all — especially if her work doesn’t at first look like painting.
“I really enjoy the process of painting,” she says. “It’s one medium that doesn’t limit the scale of color.” She points to Empire, in which Andy Warhol filmed the Empire State Building for eight hours, from dusk until dawn, and critic Arthur Danto’s musings on the film. “He wondered why Warhol didn’t just use photos to show something still, why he joined these conflicted tendencies together. I’m talking about a similar kind of thing, using the still and the handcrafted to talk about its opposite.”
But Park seems to be using modern technology anyway — at least in her own head. She often refers to the “mindscape,” which she describes as “a screen of things from your memory, films, television and other experiences and how those things become one in your mind and level onto one place.” For example, the stylized landscapes in Strange Passages incorporate elements from the 1969 film The Wild Bunch. Park says she freeze-framed different scenes, moving around and mixing pieces and parts. Her method? “Photoshop in my mind.”
Director Sam Peckinpah’s work appealed to Park because of its theme: man caught between past and future. “Cowboys, they’re these outdated, mythical heroes, so how do they function in this transitional stage?” she says. “You’re revealing man in a situation where he’s caught behind the times.”
Park admits that her move to the Midwest inspired her work as well. Born in Germany, she has lived in Korea and the Bay Area and has traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East. She moved to Kansas City to teach art and art history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. And the difference in the landscape is striking, she says.
“I’ve never lived in the middle of such an expansive place. You can’t see a coast. It keeps folding over and over. It’s almost more overwhelming in that way,” she says. “As people, we want to immerse ourselves in what we look at. It’s very seductive.”
So why aren’t more art-school grads painting landscapes?
