For this installation, the shell of the shed becomes a chrysalis, a call and response of structure and illumination, and an embrace of the simultaneous desires for intimacy and expansiveness. You are invited to a nest of the cosmos, within. As a living work, transformation will occur through the duration of the show.

This cumulative installation that will be open during our public gallery hours Friday, 4-6 and Saturday 12-3 (at 229 N. Gilbert St). This installation period beginning Friday, Sept 20th will be punctuated by surprise happenings at day and night throughout the month of October.

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 delineations 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, reciprocal, porous - 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. 

ARTIST BIO:

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.