Sardonic Tales: an Interview With Video Artist Laura Parnes
Conjuring Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, “what disturbs identity, system, order….What does not respect borders, positions, rules”, Parnes creates a willful ambivalence in her work through terse, non-linear narratives that blur the line between film and video art. Sometimes she puts the viewer in her sights right alongside the more obvious targets – pop culture, suburbia, female stereotypes, history and the anxiety of influence, etc. — as the question of our complicity, where it begins, and where it ends, is a constant subtext. Even her installations, which reassemble her production sets such that the viewer must physically enter them in order to access the work, engender this complicity.