Beautiful Delusions

“Beautiful Delusions” by Amy Benfer, Metro New York, NY, January 10, 2007

Profile. In Suellen Parker’s “Life Preserver,” a woman of a certain age, wearing a sea-foam green bikini and an old-fashioned bathing cap, poses against a cut-out backdrop of a beach scene. In one corner is the bare bottom of a box spring, which appears to have been pushed hurriedly against the wall to create an ad-hoc photography studio; in the other, the eye of a camera light glows red. In the staged world of the portrait, the woman’s eyes are unsettling in their direct, strangely human gaze.

Parker’s work appeared in last year’s spectacularly popular exhibit, “reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow,” hosted by Aperture Gallery. And technically, photography is her medium. But her slightly creepy portraits, on view in a solo show at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, gain resonance from a peculiar combination of modern technology and old-fashioned handicraft.

Each figure is modeled out of Sculptee, a plasteline clay that never dries, which means that, like the human body, the sculpture itself can change and be reshaped over time. parker then photographs the image and digitally manipulates it in Photoshop, adding backdrops taken from her own photographs, drawings and generic images form the Internet. The eyes and lips of each sculpture are created by inserting photographs of real human features, which accounts for the uncanny sensation of watching flawed fairy-tale characters come to life.

Parker’s subjects exist in the intersection between aspiration and delusion. A cheerful fellow in a crisp shirt and necktie stands in front of a conference board of advertising self-help seminars (”The Magic of Believing”); an aging woman adjusts her hair in a compact in a plume of cigarette smoked (”Uplifting Smoke”); a man happily receives a fresh injection of Botox (”Glamour Shot”).

Parker, a graduate of the School of Visual Arts, now lives in Atlanta, Ga. Her thesis adviser was Justin Bond, best known as one-half of the drag duo Kiki and Herb (he also appeared in John Cameron Mitchell’s film “Shortbus.”) It’s tempting to see Bond’s work in drag as a nice parallel to Parker’s interest in performance and creating characters.