Closing event Friday 10/11, 6-9pm
October 8th, 2024 – It has been Public Space One’s pleasure to host an installation by Heather Parrish this month in the artist courtyard and shed at Public Space One North Gallery (229 N. Gilbert, Iowa City). Please join us for a closing event with the artist at the installation site on Friday, October 11th, from 6-9pm. As a light-responsive installation, the interior and exterior luminous qualities of the shed space transform across the arc of the day and night. The sun illuminates each day, and internal lighting will illuminate each night, dusk to midnight. Physical and structural qualities will also transform over the course of the month. Community members are invited to enter the space any time day or night for their own moment of sensory awareness and reflection. The artist will activate the space through invitation at various times through the duration of the show, with a culminating event held on Friday, October 11, 6-9pm.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
The way light inhabits a space; how consciousness illuminates a body; the way memory lives outside linear structures of time; how a sense of the present expands and folds back again. In this work, I return to an earlier series entitled ‘homing’. Through translucent materials, veils, layers, screens, light and space, I explore the complex nature of inhabitation – what it means to be embodied, how this embodiment exists in relation to the world, and the unruly reciprocity between a self and beyond. Although inhabitation implies container and contained, interior and exterior, host and hosted, the two are inextricably intertwined. The boundary is fluid, porous, performing a mutually creative relation. The constant flow of change occurring along the threshold engenders an ongoing effort toward self-location: homing. Held within are notions of navigation and return, and the emotional weight contained in the desire for home.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Heather Parrish’s artistic inquiry uses printmaking, experimental photography, and installation with video projection to explore notions of perception and belonging across fluid boundaries. Her heightened sensitivity to ‘self and surrounding’ arises from a culturally nomadic childhood growing up as an American in Southeast Asia. She focuses on the boundary between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ as a porous and dynamic site of complex negotiations. Collaboration is also a sustaining part of her practice including work with scientists, filmmakers, poets, activists, bodies of water, microbes and bees. Parrish received an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Notre Dame and a BA in Kinesiology from the University of Texas at Austin. She worked as a fine art collaborating printer at Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas, and has exhibited work in the United States and internationally. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA.
Instagram: @hparrishstudio
GALLERY HOURS
Visitors can experience the installation in the artist courtyard at 229 N. Gilbert any time of day, including light projections and reflections at night. Also by appointment with the artist: heather-parrish@uiowa.edu
Public Space One (PS1) is an artist-led, community-driven, contemporary art center in Iowa City that aims to provide and advocate for independent, innovative, diverse, and inclusive art spaces, resources, and opportunities for any and everyone. PS1’s programs include a gallery, community-access studios for print/book arts (the IC Press Co-op) and media arts (the Media Arts Co-op), and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies residency program.
