Discipline: Interdisciplinary Art – multimedia installation

Laura Parnes

Discipline: Interdisciplinary Art – multimedia installation
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2022

Laura Parnes’ critically acclaimed films and installations craft loose narratives of trauma and repressed memory around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage. She has screened and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; Brooklyn Museum; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; The International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and on PBS and Spanish television. Recently she had solo exhibitions at LA><, LA, Participant Inc., Fitzroy Gallery; and solo screenings at the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Kitchen in New York. Parnes is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and a 2016 Creative Capital Awardee. Video Data Bank published a boxed set of her work, and Participant Press published a book of her scripts titled Blood and Guts in Hollywood: Two Screenplays.

At MacDowell, she wrote a script for a multi-platform installation that references the Western film genre while ruminating on the ways 1800 century historic narratives have been reabsorbed through popular culture. Her recent multi-platform project "Tour Without End" was exhibited widely, including at The Kitchen, Human Resources in Los Angeles, and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Portrait by Alice O'Malley

Studios

New Hampshire

Laura Parnes worked in the New Hampshire studio.

New Hampshire Studio, originally named Peterborough Studio, was given to MacDowell by Mr. and Mrs. William Schofield, Mrs. H. A. Chamberlain, Mrs. Andrew Draper, and Miss Ruth Cheney. The studio was renamed in 1943. The Gilbert Verney Foundation established an endowed maintenance fund in 1990, and a bequest in memory of MacDowell Fellow Victor Candell underwrote the…

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