Zien announces Sprite x Parker at The Handbag Factory in London opening Thursday, May 23rd, 6PM-9PM.
The exhibition will preview physical works from two upcoming Expanded NFT drops—Henry Sprite’s “Sentimental Graffiti” and Parker Ito’s “ParkerIto.net”—scheduled for June. Parker helped lay the foundations for the internet art we have today, Henry has built upon this legacy.
Henry Sprite is Sprite Bonkler, one of the artists and creative directors behind the infamous Milady Maker NFT collection. As someone might have once said: “the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale should simply be a Milady”.
In Parker’s own words:
I’m interested in making work that mimics the mechanism of the internet… I’m trying to make something so complicated that it can’t be understood, so total that you can never zoom all the way out.
In “Sentimental Graffiti”, Sprite unshackles himself from the screen. Or does he? There are paintings, some encased in vitrines and occasionally flipped horizontally to be used functionally, but these come out of a protracted digital process. Copious amounts of digital source material is fed into a custom AI pipeline, then arranged by hand into collaged compositions to then be fed back through another set of AI adjustments. Michel Majerus, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and other painters that captured the schizophrenic advance of the 21st century are key references. But here taken to their extreme with the use of ever more powerful and omniscient technologies. The final digital works are mischievously hidden within fictional gallery and exhibition spaces and only fully accessible online. It’s a nod to the uneasy position of these artworks, both the digital and the physical layers, simultaneously inside and outside conventional art world constraints.
Drawing on his archive of source material, Parker has for the first time utilised the digital production techniques of contemporary NFT artists, making use of generative software to collage and smash together his varied imagery, whether meme, gif, text or something else. The central figure in most of these works is the Parked Domain Girl, a stock photo widely used within the templates of “parked domains”, an image Parker has returned to many times in his painting series, “The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet”. Here she functions as a kind of PFP (meaning both profile pic and picture for proof), which remains one of the optimum forms for NFTs because of the way they encapsulate and propel mimetic and cult power. All of this takes place within the framework of one of Parker’s many websites: ParkerIto.net. This is designed to mimic the original “parked” template the Parked
Domain Girl images were associated with. Traversing the narratives of Web2 as they transform to Web3, by an artist uniquely able to do so, there are constants: the ubiquity of networks and their constant presence in Parker’s art. In addition, each NFT can be redeemed as an oil painting produced to order from an art factory in China. Like the digital works these are unlimited in supply. Traversing massive online and physical networks and collapsing authorship, “Parkerito.net” is a truly proliferating and surging project.
Henry Sprite & Parker Ito, Sprite x Parker, 23rd May — 26th May, 2024, The Handbag Factory
Private views: May 23rd, 6PM-9PM / May 25th, 1PM-6PM
About
Henry Sprite is a semi-pseudonymous artist working with various digital mediums in the space of the internet and crypto. More recent work has seen a shift to painting and physical works, still employing the same love for systems and databases and citation found in Otaku culture, auction/institutional imagery and German “Bad Painting”.
Parker Ito (b. 1986, Ventura, CA) is an artist who has exhibited his work in the past, and will continue to exhibit his work in the future (hopefully). His website is: www.parker.sex.
Zien is a contemporary art platform that aims to transform the centuries-old user experience of collecting art. At the heart of the platform are what we call Expanded NFTs, digital artworks that can be acquired and later redeemed for physical counterparts. To date, Zien has enabled drops by artists such as Agnieszka Kurant, Petra Cortright and Ed Fornieles, and produced drops that have been acquired by renowned institutions including Centre Pompidou, Kadist and Castello di Rivoli. zien.io
