Birds & Blokes:  Upfront with Amber Parsons

This month our community is once again lucky enough to have a quality art exhibit at the Upfront Gallery. The featured artist for December is local creator Amber Parsons, a dynamic artist with the ability to shift seamlessly between multiple modes of production.

Amber is an accomplished professional tattooist, an academically trained ceramicist, a dedicated painter, and a provocative performance artist. Birds and Blokes—the title of Amber’s show—features a strong cross section of Amber’s many talents. It is her first solo exhibition.

She does not have a preferred medium. She is trained as a ceramicist and works as a tattooist, but claims her primary tools are color and texture. Her process is very intuitive and exploratory. She usually starts with a sketch, or by playing with different materials, and lets the process lead the way, without necessarily having a preconceived idea for where it will take her. Even though she begins her process without knowing exactly where it will end, recurring themes and possible meanings emerge.

Amber’s intent was to create a transformative environment, sort of like a living room arranged with an aesthetic rather than functional logic. There are paintings and drawings hung next to ceramic sculptures, with an interactive conceptual piece hanging out amidst the visual delight.

Images of skulls and birds dance with ceramic representations of raw meat and finely crafted vessels. Artistic portrayals of jellyfish mingle with dead flowers and surreal landscapes. All of the pieces are linked to each other by a common aesthetic, a repeated subject, or a thought provoking concept.

Amber was able to create an eclectic environment full of variety without it being awkwardly incongruous or discordant. One can begin with any piece in the exhibit and find a connection to another piece in the show, which creates a harmonious equilibrium throughout the environment.

This seems to be hard to accomplish without being boorishly repetitive or predictable.

The title Birds and Blokes, which is British slang for girls and guys, references some of the subject matter in the exhibit, but it is also a subtle allusion to one of the underlying themes of the show. Amber acknowledges that our abstract concepts, such as femininity and beauty, depend on their opposites to have meaning. She seeks to express a vision of beauty, but wants to retain a bit of the ugliness of life in her work.

This can be seen in some of her ceramic vessels and objects on display. The pieces are finely crafted with colorful glazes, but they are purposefully transformed by organic textures, which seem to scar or disfigure the objects.

This can evoke a visceral response from the viewer, who must reconcile the dualities inherent in witnessing the juxtapositions. The result is a sort of neutralization of opposites, which can encourage the viewer to transcend the confines of binary (either/or) logic.

This play between opposites is ubiquitous in the environment Amber created. She fabricated oval ceramic frames with a craft aesthetic, but chose to display them as either empty frames or with strategically placed small scale ceramic objects.

The arrangement creates a tension between the concepts of inside/outside and emptiness/fullness, which must be reconciled by the viewer. By framing void, Amber points out that the void is a mental construct. It wasn’t there until the frame brought attention to it.

By placing objects on either side of the frame, she brings into consciousness the interdependency of the notions of inside and outside. You can’t have one without the other, but it is through acts of mental arbitration that these concepts are brought into existence. In other words, our world of opposites is entirely fabricated by our minds, which we bring into existence through our perceptual relation to the world.

Amber’s interactive conceptual piece, Tacticulation, explores the dualities of public/private and process/product. A lime green wooden chair is positioned against the wall with a phone book, a pen, and a pad of paper on the seat. Next to the chair is a glass jar with notes in it.

Amber invites viewers to participate by having them randomly select a name and address from the phone book. The participant is asked to write the name and address on a piece of paper along with a message to the intended recipient. When the exhibit is over, Amber will send the messages via snail mail in colorfully decorated envelopes, which will eventually be opened and read by the unsuspecting recipients.

Can you imagine receiving a mysterious note in the mail saying “drink more milk” or “big brother is watching”? How would you react? Amber wants to affect the private lives of others and “shake them out of their comas.” The idea is to randomly touch peoples’ lives to expand her influence on society in small but meaningful ways, and to connect with others whom she does not have a personal relationship with.

The idea is fascinating, but sadly, to this day (Dec. 17), viewers of the piece would not be able to infer that they are supposed to participate in the process because the instructions have not been posted. The show has been open to the public since the beginning of December.

About the Gallery…

The Upfront Gallery is operated and maintained by an artists’ collective. All of the artists involved have full-time jobs in addition to their gallery responsibilities.

Their work for the gallery is entirely voluntary, and most of them contribute from their already limited resources to keep it floating. It operates on a shoe-string budget, an “anti-budget” to be more precise, and it is a struggle to keep it going every month.

Most of the artists involved do not make a living from their art. They are essentially wage-slaves in an economy that is unable or unwilling to support their true work. So they are left scrambling at the last minute because they are usually too busy attending to the imminent economic realities of their existence.

The gallery inevitably gets put on the back burner because that’s not where they are getting fed. It’s actually to the point where the collective is considering closing the doors because the resources simply aren’t there, which is really sad because the community would surely be deprived if shows like Amber’s were unable to exist.

The Upfront Gallery needs your help and a lot more support from the community in order to keep showing exciting exhibits like Amber’s. They need volunteers to watch the gallery, artists to rent available studio space, donations of any kind, and patrons willing to take a risk and buy the art on display.
If you are willing and able to help, please call the Upfront Gallery at 701-364-0934.

Amber’s show will be on display through the end of December.

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