LUKE PARKER
drawings/recordings, 2001 

Exhibited: Blaugrau, Sydney 

Alex Gawronski, exhibition text 



In Luke Parker's exhibition at Blaugrau, the artist traces the many trajectories leading to the finished work. He presents a series of stitched 'drawings', referencing cut-and-paste techniques more common to music and film. In fact, Parker avoids the preciousness of traditional works on paper, choosing instead a more holistic interpretation of images and their origins. In this instance, three pieces in the exhibition are derived from the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' series of 'paper stacks’. In these, Gonzalez-Torres presents printed piles of identical – bland, yet poetic – photographic images, which visitors may take away with them. Parker has brought some of these together, some gifted from friends, and others collected personally. Each has been interpreted differently. 

One image in black and white, of an empty stretch of ocean, has been superimposed with the cover of a Joy Division album. In this instance however, the graphic is inverted and now reads as a reflection on the water's surface. Indeed, the work is a personal though equally critical reflection on certain types of images and their ability to move and affect us. Another work originally from Gonzalez-Torres is simply a printed silver square with a white bar at one end. Viewed in another way, the silver becomes an ocean, while the white line indicates a horizon. The resolutely abstract and flat becomes representational, a means of suggesting future events. Stitched over this page is a quote from a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 'flimsy crust of our world, over the naked universe'. The quote converts the silver square into a mirror of the filmmaker's words. At the same time the reflectivity of Pasolini's favourite medium, film, and of all representation, is conjured. 

In addition and coupled with these works are a series of sound recordings, which capture the incidental acoustic terrain of the artist's living and working environments. Together, the sound and paper works subjectively unite the aural and visual threads that weave meaning into the texture of our lives.