Miriam Parker Studio

About Miriam Parker

 
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Who is Miriam Parker:   

Miriam Parker is an interdisciplinary artist who uses movement, paint, video art and sculpture/installation.

Miriam Parker has been influenced by her experience as a dancer, her study of Buddhism phenomenology, and her connection to the free jazz tradition.  Parker creates durational films that accompany performance, within which she creates movable sculptural sonic elements in site specific environments. Through re-organizational practices, Parker refines her understanding of individuality, outside of traditions built from oppressive ethics. Her practice is to find new modes of freedom through multiple narratives as a means to evolve.  Her work is rooted in a mission to explore the intersections of dance, visual and performance art, and architecture and is particularly intrigued by how architecture designs movement.  As an improviser and a reactive artist, Parker views space as a choreographic element, shaping and being shaped by the movement and the moment.  Growing up in the East Village supplied her with a vibrant art community that has deeply influenced her creative practice.  Parker views her work as a living organism and is interested in keeping it alive through animating and reimagining the possibilities of static spaces.  Using the work as a way to map out ideas that cannot be materialized, questioning how we depict ethical behaviors, and creating liminal spaces through building structures that must adhere to the experience of freedom, Parker crafts immersive environments where these ideas are not just imagined, but actively lived and continuously redefined.  

Parker has recently shown work at Yeh Art Gallery in Queens, NY and performed at the Merz Festival in Berlin, Germany. She was an artist in residence at Mana Contemporary in 2022 where she participated in a group show with the Monira Foundation.  In 2021 she received the Toulmin Fellowship through CBA and National Sawdust in collaboration with Marisa Michelson.  Parker has performed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art(New York), PS1 MoMA(New York), The Fridman Gallery(New York), The Shed(New York), Festival Sons d’Hiver(Paris), Every Women Biennial(New York), Survey Dover Plains(New York), Vision Festival(New York), the Satellite Art Fair(Miami), and Clement Soto Velez Cultural and Education Center(New York) amongst others.  She has shown work in residency at École Normale Supérieure(Paris), at 2B&2C Gallery(New York), Brackish Film Festival(New York), Soft Network Showroom(New York), Triskelion Arts(New York), Pioneer Works (New York), and has participated in residencies at Governors Island in the House of Poetics curated by Cooper Union, BASC in Accord, New York, Nars Foundation Residency on Governors Island, FiveMyles Summer Residency, and more. 

She is co-founder and collaborator of Lost Voyage, a multimedia collaborative work led by seven women artists, Lost Voyage is an ongoing collaborative project that explores human relationships with displacement, haven, and metaphysical constructs through a communal experience. They have performed in WhiteBox New York, NY; Five Myles, in Brooklyn, NY; and Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn, NY. Parker lives and works in New York City.

 

Who is Miriam:

Miriam Parker’s work is deeply informed by her performative experience as a dancer, and greatly influenced by her study of Buddhism and phenomenology, and her connection to the free jazz tradition. Her professional career has extended overseas to Europe and Israel working with Amanda Miller ‘Pretty Ugly dance company, Maggie Donlon and WIlliam Forsythe amongst others, Sally Silver, Andrea Galiim, and with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks until present. In 2010, She began her longtime collaboration with visual artist Jo Wood-Brown under the name InnerCity Projects. She has continued the ritual of collaborative process with other artist such and musicians. She has presented and performed my work at Satellite Art Fair (2017), Fridman Gallery of NYC (2019), and a week-long residency at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris (2019), Every Woman Biennial (2019), the Park Armory (2019), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2019), New York Artbook Fair at MoMA PS1 (2019), and month residency at Governors Island in the house of poetics curated by Cooper Union.

About the Work:

My practice defies standard definitions of material by combining movement, paint, sound, video projection, sculpture and installation to create performance-based works. I arrive at a meeting point where familiar images in our past and present cultures are recombined to address the concerns of identity, self, and the archetypal figure of the female form, through the guise of art history. My use of paint allows me to blur the lines between figure and background. I explore the way my body appears and disappears through visual medium in a way that traverses my personal narrative with one that is archetypal. My process, captured through video, creates a platform in which I can combine all the mediums onto one form.