Gritty Putty

The Radar Art
GRITTY PUTTY by Felicia Feaster, The Atlantan Magazine, October 2008

Photographer Suellen Parker crafts angst and poetry from clay and a camera as part of ACP’s photo fest

On occasion, a New York Times Magazine or Discover editor will want a psychologically loaded image to accompany an article. Something suitably moody and ruminative to illustrate a story on schizophrenia or child abuse that conveys trauma, but also the complex and enigmatic ways the human mind copes. Th eir go-to girl, more often than not, is School of Visual Arts-educated Atlanta photographer, Suellen Parker. Parker will speak on October 9 about her uniquely gritty, dark photographs and exhibit her work in the Dalton Gallery group show Hello Liberty during the 10th annual image fête, Atlanta Celebrates Photography (ACP).

The 35-year-old photographer has carved a special niche in both her commercial and her fi ne art work, creating photographs that overfl ow with the subtler shadings of human experience: trauma, doubt, a desire for approval, loneliness and vanity. In 2006 she created a chilling photograph of Hansel and Gretel wandering through a foreboding storybook forest that expressed the dense, tangled emotional landscape of childhood sexual abuse for a New York Times Magazine article “A Question of Resilience.” A psychologist in New England who saw her image in the Times and ended up incorporating it into his counseling wrote to Parker, “Th ank you for keeping the darkness alive.” Parker knows what he means. “Even after you go through therapy there still is darkness. Because life is complex,” she says.

Part of the peculiar magic of Parker’s work is her process, crafting real, nuanced emotions using artifi cial, manufactured means. To create her works she fi rst sculpts a fi gure with plasteline oil-based clay, photographs it and then—via the wonders of Photoshop—paints on clothing and inserts backgrounds and facial features from other photographs. A Frankenstein hybrid of the real and the artifi cial, the fi gures embody what Freud called the “uncanny”—the creepy quality of looking human without being human.

Parker spent her formative years in the Atlanta suburbs and betrayed an early interest in tiny, malleable bodies by collecting Madame Alexander dolls. “Not ones you could play with” she cautions. She went on to graduate school at New York’s School of Visual Arts where her mentor was the “gender illusionist” and downtown drag cabaret performer Justin Bond. Parker and Bond shared an interest in how people can inhabit two worlds: a squishy, emotional, interior place and a mask-like, cautious, socially circumscribed exterior one.

Parker’s photographs embody that inside-outside quandary. In her fi rst major body of work called Incurable, Parker showed the strain and pathos involved in trying to live up to a cultural beauty standard. In Incurable her characters act out scenarios of self-improvement, balance on yoga balls and soldier through Botox injections. “Th ere’s something about plasteline,” Parker says, and its mottled, rough surface, “that lends itself to communicate the struggle or imperfection in the creation of ourselves.” In her new series, whose working title is Gender Fluid, her strange puppet-people grapple with more deep-seated issues of androgyny and sexual identity. “I’m just trying to look at the complexities of people,” says Parker, of the poetry behind her method. “I think it’s not so simple as male and female. Th ere are a lot of variations in between.”