Kate Parsons The Dark Spring
Parsons’s current work focuses on themes of mortality as a meditation on the passing of time and the celebration of the natural cycle of death and rebirth. An excess of color, beauty and decay is portrayed in the artist’s’ distinctive electro-Victorian sensibility.
This current body of work takes inspiration from such varied subjects as cinema, mythology, literature, religion and anthropology and is interpreted through a hybrid practice consisting of analog and digital video, virtual reality, and found-objects assemblage.
Parsons’s Coaxial residency falls just after the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere, a time of year marked by cultures across the world for millennia. Mythological stories often carry the motifs of an underworld-dwelling divinity emerging into the light, as frost-covered earth once again becomes teaming with life. This myth is reinterpreted within Parsons’s work through the use of screen-based media and technology.
Bio:
Kate is a video artist, VR artist, and educator living in Los Angeles. She obtained her M.F.A. in Media Arts from UCLA in 2015, and completed her M.A. in Digital Art and Video in 2013. She is the Director of Femmebit, a video art festival celebrating female artists working in video and new media in Los Angeles, and co-founder of FLOAT, a virtual reality studio shared with Ben Vance and Daniel Lisi. Much of her work centers on the use of the moving image to convey themes of memory and mortality, and is firmly grounded in the history of abstract film and expanded cinema. She is currently faculty at Art Center College of Design, Pepperdine University and Pasadena City College.
