Olivia Parker: Vanishing in Plain Sight
Olivia Parker
Vanishing in Plain Sight
VANISHING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Vanishing in Plain Sight is a deeply personal photographic journey by Olivia Parker into Alzheimer’s disease and its effects on the brain and memory. Parker experienced the disease through her late husband, John Parker who passed away in 2016. She began making photographs after John’s diagnosis, as well as compiling writing to accompany them. She found that her images and words opened up a dialogue on a difficult subject. The work is captivating and emotionally charged featuring self-portraiture and piles of personal notes. The self-portraits are characterized by a unique use of motion and blur. Parker spoke of her of choice to include motion in her images saying “When a subject or a camera moves during an exposure the subject disappears partially or entirely. I found that this characteristic of photography was well suited to the images I wanted to create next.” Parker found notes that her beloved husband had left behind, piles of cards he had used to remind him of all the important people and places in his life. The cards recur throughout the work, often bathed in vibrant streaks of light. Light is an extremely important asset to Parker’s work as natural light glares mix with colored light to create dynamic compositions and highlight small details. Parker spoke of the role light played in both her work as well as in relation to Alzheimer’s research sharing “After so many years of working with light I like the idea that the application of light at a specific frequency is repairing neutral connections in mice, enabling them to retrieve lost memories.”
ABOUT OLIVIA PARKER
After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in the History of Art, Parker began her career as a painter, and became involved in photography in 1970. Mostly self-taught she makes ephemeral constructions to photograph and experiments with the endless possibilities of light. She has had more than one hundred one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in major private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Portfolios of her work have been published in Art News, American Photographer, Camera, Camera Arts, The Sciences and numerous other magazines in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1996 she received a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. Residencies include Dartmouth College in 1988, The MacDowell Colony in 1993 and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1997. Currently she is working on Still and not so Still Life that comprises images of both the expected and the unexpected.