February 2012 Artist: Lori Anne Parker-Danley

How an artist sees and experiences the world impacts the work they produce. Lori Anne Parker-Danley is no exception. She's a local Nashville artist. Her work is a rich depiction of her mind and her heart full of color, motion, life and death. Her new show "The Garden of Evolution" which opens Feb. 4th at the Twist Etc. here in Nashville, Tennessee is a mix of paintings and mixed media. Lori has a PhD in philosophy, she's a strong naturalist and a heart attack survivor. All of these perspectives are woven into her work with energy and passion. The show is about transformation and growth, death and decomposition, origins and destinations. Her goal is to expose people to the beauty of such things and how our world is an ever changing and adapting garden of life and death. I had the pleasure to sit down with Lori Anne recently to get to know her a little more, talk about this exciting show and her goals for the future. Here is the video! I hope you enjoy!

Artist Bio:

Lori Anne Parker-Danley is a Nashville-based artist with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Binghamton University in upstate New York. Among the artists who inspire her are Hyman Bloom, Chaïm Soutine, Elaine DeKooning, and Anselm Kiefer. She is also influenced by the imagery, ideas, and playfulness of the Surrealists—especially Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington—and broadly considers her work to be a conversation between expressionism and surrealism, albeit from a contemporary perspective. Despite and in spite of all the pitfalls, exclusions, and erasures associated with creating canons, schools, and art-historical categories, Lori Anne thinks that trying to make art without listening, responding, and acknowledging the artists who came before you is like painting with your eyes closed. 

As a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign since 2010 and a woman who had two heart attacks and bypass surgery at the age of 38 in 2009 (even though she “never thought it would happen to her”) Lori Anne has been using her art as a way to help get the word out about the risks of heart disease in women. She had her first “Art for the Heart” event in February 2011 at Rumours Wine and aRT Bar, 12 South, Nashville, which was well-received. With The Garden of Evolution, showing at Twist Etc. in February 2012, she is continuing these efforts. In honor of National Go Red month and the American Heart Association, Lori Anne will be “going red” by donating 10 percent of the artist proceeds from exhibition sales to Go Red for Women. 

Artist statement about The Garden of Evolution:

Broadly conceived, The Garden of Evolution is an attempt to evoke the phenomenology of human corporeality, its relationships with the non-human natural world, and its place in the history of evolution. The exhibition and series of paintings by the same title are inspired by questions of human/biological materiality that have interested me as an artist and philosopher for many years, as well as the life-saving, emergency heart surgery I underwent in 2009, which focused my attention on these questions in a more profound, directly personal way. One of the most intense moments that happened in the days after my surgery was the experience of seeing my own heart (My surgeon took a picture of it with his iPhone during my operation). Seeing my own heart was akin to seeing my animality: the image of my heart in my cut-open chest, which could have been anybody’s heart in any cut-open chest, was jarring to me because of its biological anonymity. The heart I saw was mine, but I could never know as my own. It was me, but beyond me—the experience of looking into a mirror and staring at a stranger. 

To see one’s own heart is an invitation to notice the repetition of forms, to hear the echo that beats in the chests of a billion others, to understand that there is nothing special or significant or even that original about your own heart even though it is necessary for you to live. To see one’s own heart is also an opportunity—to see through it, past it, to notice and recall patterns—such as the chambers of a human heart alongside the heart of a feline or the spiraling twist of the human inner ear alongside the curves of a buoyant nautilus or the branches of alveoli in the lungs of a rabbit that might remind one of a copse of trees. Repeating forms evoke our connections and common origin, our shared animal-plant biology. Repeating forms invite us to contemplate our existence as part of the material world and the fact that human life is but a single, small, beautiful moment in a much larger 4.5 billion-year planetary history. The Garden of Evolution is the place we all begin and a place where everything is made of stardust. The Garden of Evolution is also a dream, the other side of waking life, the strangeness that is familiar, and the constant striving where forms both old and new emerge, mingle, and transform yet again.

The paintings in this exhibition are a departure from much of my past work in terms of their increased expressiveness and the materials I’ve used. While working on this project, I have tried to simply release myself to the muscularity of the gesture and the physicality of paint. I am after paintings that aren’t representations of bodies but highly physical, bodily moments in and of themselves. This effort has drawn me to new materials: in addition to oil, graphite, and charcoal, some of the paintings in the series include elements such as cat fur, twigs, cicada exoskeletons, human hair, orchids, foliage, moss, snakeskins, and sculpted paper. Instead of using these materials to “augment” the paintings, my intention is to put these additional materials and objects in conversation with the paint and make them part of (or a continuation of) my gestures and brushstrokes. The use of various nontraditional media is also another way of expressing the subject matter of the work itself, generally the connections, transformations, and relationships between natural life forms that are part of the evolutionary process.

The exhibition at Twist Etc. has been an opportunity to push my work even further in direct response to the particular environment of the gallery space. As such, The Garden of Evolution is not simply an exhibit of paintings, but a larger on-site, multimedia art installation that includes the paintings, additional objects and effects, and a sound composition by Nashville-based guitarist and composer John Danley: Another evolution.

Listed in order of appearance:

Lori Anne Parker-Danley. Oscar's Nightmare (The Garden of Evolution #4), 2011. Oil, graphite, leaves, shedded snakeskins, and human hair on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

Lori Anne Parker-Danley. Rite of Spring (The Garden of Evolution #3), 2011. Oil, graphite, branches, various foliage, and cicada exoskeletons on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

Lori Anne Parker-Danley. Exuberant Bodies (The Garden of Evolution #6), 2011. Oil and graphite on canvas, 36 x 24 in.

Lori Anne Parker-Danley. Eerie Frondescence (The Garden of Evolution #9), 2011. Oil, graphite, charcoal, sculpted paper, cat fur, twigs, and plants on canvas, 24 x 30 in.

Lori Anne Parker-Danley. Eerie Frondescence (The Garden of Evolution #9), 2011. Oil, graphite, and charcoal on canvas, 36 x 24 in.