english
| Denise Parsons "I
enjoy constructing my own dreamlike realities by building miniature
stage sets and creating photographs similar to film stills. Questions
about women and identity have influenced my work and my life for quite
some time, perhaps as long as I can remember. In Trouble in Candyland,
2007 I had begun thinking about female roles in fairy tales and the
imaginary "film" I was envisioning resembled a Brothers Grimm fairy
tale. The tales we read today are sanitized versions of the original
stories. The princess in the original version of The Frog King did not
kiss her frog to turn him into a prince, she threw the frog at the wall
as hard as she could and it awoke as a prince. I built the landscape
and added the fabulous little German figures to help me create the
scene. I liked the idea of the larger pretty yet stern female figure
with long braids, rosy lips and cheeks, and curvaceous figure hovering
over the little men while she appeared to be making some strong demands
- all in a beautiful fairy land. The scene seemed so full of
contradictions and questions. I loved it, I made some photographs, and
we all lived happily ever after."
Denise Parsons lives and works in San Francisco, California. Inspiration for her work tends to stem more from the internal and the literary than the external and the visual. The images conjured up while reading authors such as Marilynne Robinson, Shirley Jackson, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman inject her work. She has employed a variety of media (photography, video, installation, sculpture, embroidery, sewing, performance, poetry, and prose) to crop her ideas from the surrounding world and mimic the decontextualized and transformed fragments from dreams and reality that become memory. Parsons earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Arizona State University and her Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. www.deniseparsons.com |   image © denise parsons |
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