Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Video, Drawing, Printmaking, Net Art
Website: parker.sex
Parker Ito was born in 1986 in Long Beach, California. In his youth, he acted and sang on television, and before becoming a professional artist he aspired to become a professional skateboarder and worked painting oil derricks in Los Angeles. Growing up, he and his friends made skate videos, through which he learned to edit video and use Photoshop to make flyers, posters, and patches — skills he did not initially recognize as art. At age 18, reading a book on Jean-Michel Basquiat prompted him to pursue a professional artistic practice. He attended California College of the Arts in Oakland, where early signature bodies of work began to take shape. Ito is a Yonsei/Gosei Japanese American artist currently living in San Francisco and working in Los Angeles.
During the early 2010s, Ito became known for producing mass amounts of art, rapidly building a reputation within the emerging post-internet generation of artists. His work has been exhibited at museums and art centers internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; and Times Museum, Guangzhou. Solo and group exhibitions have been presented at Andrea Rosen Gallery, White Cube (London), Sadie Coles HQ, Team Gallery (New York and Los Angeles), Air de Paris, and Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco).
His work is held in collections from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas. Other collections holding his work include the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; ICA Miami; Princeton University; Wesleyan University; and the Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing. He is represented by Château Shatto, the Los Angeles-based gallery directed by Olivia Barrett.
Ito’s work takes the form of installation, painting, sculpture, video, drawing, websites, and printmaking. Materially inventive and heavy with processes that might corrupt or enhance, he produces impressions of the things around him — assembling cultural markers, ornaments, vistas, and consumables, and pushing these arrangements through technologies including screens, cameras, printers, and hand-painting. His works often make use of non-traditional art materials, such as reflective 3M Scotch-lite fabric, automotive paint, and vinyl. He is known for the high volume of his output — sometimes under different names — and his sense of humor. He does not consider himself a conceptual artist, but says his work is rooted in “konceptualism,” which he describes as “similar to when people spell the word ‘cool,’ ‘kewl’ or ‘kool.’”
Across his wide-reaching practice, Ito tends toward the fleeting and evanescent — images, articles, and ephemera are positioned not as concrete sources but as hauntological referents, obfuscated through varied formal apparati, cast into the domain of the specter and a networked afterlife. One recurring element of his working style involves hiring paid assistants to produce work, and he allows for the produced works to be made in the style of the hired hand. Ito plays with the conventions of exhibition-making — including alternative installation strategies and the extensions of the exhibition such as the artist bio and press release — and has described his desire to make exhibitions where there is always a potential for the work to be shifting, like an artist’s website that is always being edited.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.