Parker Lily Tuson-Morse
Biography
Parker Lily was born and raised in Toronto Canada, and works primarily in Boston, Massachusetts. Her practice includes printmaking, photo manipulation, and experimental painting using both traditional mediums and laser engraving. Through hand and machine made paintings she creates anamorphic beings, to explore the monstrous feminine, cyborg persona’s and a continual metamorphosis of the somatic and psychological states of the figure. Her work is influenced by dream motifs and psychoanalytic theories of the self, as well as the surrealist practices of automatism, mirroring and distortion, in which parts of the figure have been deconstructed and reconstructed through natural and technological distortions. She is currently a senior BFA student at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Artist Statement
The figure is always present in my work, yet as limbs and features are multiplied, and space is transformed to feel otherworldly, the moments captured are of a being stuck in a liminal state of flux, metamorphosing with one foot in reality and one out. Through pushing the bounds of realism and figuration I illustrate a concept of self that refuses fixity and is constantly shapeshifting in an ever-changing environment. Through these means, I traverse the many aspects of ‘selves,’ our bodily relationships to sexuality and queerness, and how external relationships and the digital realm influence our internal environment.
My Senior Thesis installation Doppelgänger explores the effects of unbalanced relationship dynamics on our psyche and how subconscious feelings of dysregulation can become illustrated through the skin. While unpacking these dynamics through paint I am also investigating how we can learn to become more embodied through movement, play, and a connection between our corporeal self and our erotic and creative nature.
The handmade oil paintings in this installation are larger than life, colors are saturated heavily, fragmented bodies of a single individual are multiplied, and the imagined environments are blurred through airbrush. These life-sized painted figures are in a dance of unresolved shapeshifting, reflecting moments of internal contemplation affected by external relationships.
My laser-engraved paintings create digitized skins and portraits through a meticulously controlled material process. When I step away from traditional painting processes and employ technological ones such as laser engraving, I use these tools to push the bounds of my images, and play with the dialectic between the robotic nature of technology and machines, being employed to illustrate a corporeal self, charged with feeling and metaphorical content. I use this machine as a prosthetic device to explore how technology alters our relationship to self, its dissemination through digital media, and how these external structures complicate our relationship to self even further.
Website: parkerlily.com
Email: parkerlilytm@gmail.com
Instagram: @parkerlilytm
