Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
192 CULTURED Erik Parker { Photographed in New York City on October 2, 2015 } C ool Rug Burn." "Found God." "King Tubby." "Cheech." If the names of Erik Parker's hand-mixed paint colors sound more like street drugs, the comparison is not too far off the mark; the artist's electric hues have a way of radiating from the canvas, inducing a near hallucinogenic state in his viewers. They're also addictive. Parker can't seem to keep paintings in his studio for long. He's currently polishing off his latest body of work, due to debut this December at Paul Kasmin Gallery in an exhibition titled "Undertow," which will mix the artist's psychedelic landscapes with portraits. "Well, not so much 'portraits' as 'head shapes,'" Parker clarified. "All of it deals with the human condition and changes in how we think." The artist imagines his paintings operating like a smartphone. "If we look at a Rothko, there's a sense of closure. But our way of thinking is vastly different now. We don't end at the end of the day. Right before you sleep, you look at fifty things all at once on your smartphone." Parker replicates this predicament in his studio, anchoring each new painting with a pre-existing image, sourced through targeted Google searches. "I basically pick a theme—say a tropical landscape—and then I find the most common image, the number one hit for that subject." Parker then introduces his own improvisations, from suggestively rendered fruits and flora to orphaned anatomical elements. "The original image is just a way to trigger a response, to trick the viewer into thinking the image looks familiar. By the time I'm done making something, it will have evolved into something else entirely." If there is a whiff of the Chicago Imagists in Parker's rambunctious visual vocabulary—which spans from the genital-like tentacles of the plants populating his jungle scenes to the carnival marquees of his text paintings—it may be because the artist got his start pouring over albums of The Hairy Who. "I guess I was attracted to stuff like that because it wasn't what you were supposed to be looking at. I'd find these obscure books in the fine arts library, instead of looking at Johns or Warhol." In this sense, consider "Undertow" a nod to the rejuvenating power of counter culture. "A city like New York will always have its ups and downs," Parker reasoned. "Right now, sure, it's a little mild culturally. Anytime there's a tremendous amount of wealth, culture inevitably downgrades. Money breeds comfort, and you don't make interesting culture when you're comfortable." That doesn't mean the artist isn't optimistic. "There's that sense of undertow, which means things are brewing underneath," he observed. "It's actually a great time to be making art." —Kate Sutton P O R T R A I T B Y M A T T H U P L A C E K