Navigating Mental Geographies and Natural History
a profile of sculptor and installation artist Eugene Parnell
published in Art Access, Dec.-Jan. 2006
'Detail from 'Yield'
installation by Eugene ParnellThe first time I saw works by Eugene Parnell was an accidental encounter. I was on my way to Barefoot Studios in Tacoma, and I walked past a funny looking little building that looked like an Art Deco service station circa 1954. Lining the wall were a series of shelves and upon each shelf sat a stuffed animal on an old fashioned grocery scale. (The stuffed rabbit, for those who might wonder, registered less than half a pound on the scale.) I didn’t know what I was looking at. I certainly didn’t know it was intended as a work of art, although my first thought was "Wow, this ought to be in an art gallery." Nor did I know that the funny little building was the just-opened Ice Box Gallery. Later I learned that the installation was a piece called "yield" by the sculptor Eugene Parnell, who manages the gallery.
This work and another piece by Parnell called "Life in the Seas, Part I: The Cambrian" are now being shown at Zeitgeist Coffee House in Pioneer Square.
Parnell has the kind of imagination one might associate with a writer of graphic novels, and an insatiable curiosity about things most people never think about, such as why museum dioramas look so strange and what he calls "the mental geographies of childhood and the politics of Natural History and its presentation."
He is a sculptor and installation artist whose works deal with natural history. Anthropomorphized animals loom large in his work -- animals that tend to act a lot like out-of-control children. Many of his works look like the afore-mentioned museum dioramas, but constructed with a combination of carefully crafted wood, carved and painted foam, and found objects. In some of them it is impossible to tell which objects the artist has made and which he has appropriated; while in others an almost crude, hand-made look masks fine underlying craftsmanship.
"Life in the Seas I: The Cambrian" is an almost wall-size aquarium with a painted background to simulate an underwater scene filled with denizens of the Cambrian period from some 500 million years ago. There are rocks and corals and strange undersea plants, and creatures that are both beautiful and menacing. Parnell says the creatures were based on written descriptions of plants and animals that lived at the time, and that he saw illustrations of such creatures only after he crafted his own interpretations.
"Like a lot of kids," Parnell says, "I loved trips to the museum. In my case, it wasn't a really grand museum, just the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. When I was really young, my grandfather worked there, and once he took me behind the scenes to meet the curators and preparators. They were putting together a Mastodon skeleton, and of course, being in first grade, I was really into all kinds of dinosaurs and prehistoric animals, and I was thrilled. I had an encyclopedic knowledge of them, a lot of little kids do. I had brought with me a fossil that I had found in a rock, and they identified it for me, a crinoid from the Ordovician period, I think. They had the usual dioramas in the museum too, depicting native Midwestern landscapes. They had one with buffalo on the prairie, and you could see a thunderstorm coming in the distance, there was real lightning that would flash every few minutes. I used to stand in front of it for the longest time, waiting for the lightning to flash."
"Life in the Seas" was a long time coming. Parnell did similar works going back to his graduate studies when his MFA show was a set of fake museum artifacts attributed to a fictional ethnic group in New Guinea. When he first moved to Seattle, he did a similar work for SOIL called "Lost Naturalist of the Pacific" consisting of fake artifacts presented in the context of a book of biographies of fictional explorers and scientists. In his diormas, books, sculptures, on his Web site and in various installations, Parnell creates whole worlds that are part scientific research, part guesswork and imagination, and part visual wordplay. The results are often humorous. The creatures in "Life in the Seas," for example, can be seen as undersea animals that might have resulted from evolution gone haywire, because he based them on verbal descriptions and imagination rather than on illustrations of plants and animals from the Cambrian explosion. He describes this diorama as "paralleling the writers of medieval bestiaries, called on to illustrate real animals they had themselves never witnessed, and relying on the faulty memories of travelers to inform their vision." He thinks of his work as "a form of structured inquiry into the relationship between the world around us and the world inside each of our heads."
"Yield" is a set of a dozen vintage taxidermy animals. Each of the fish, turtles, rabbits, blowfish and other creatures is propped atop an old grocery scale, and each scale has its own wooden shelf. The taxidermy animals are specimens liberated from Midwestern antique malls. Parnell does not taxidermy anything himself, and prefers pieces that are "older than a couple decades" and specimens that were originally created for some other purpose. "Yield" includes ducks, fish, squirrels and other animals. It combines Parnell’s love of the natural world with his love of wordplay. The title is a pun on the double meaning of "yield" as a verb, meaning to give way to another; and as a noun, meaning the amount of agricultural product that can be produced from a given acreage.
The genesis for his current body of work comes from a trip to Africa in 2001-02, financed in part by an Artist Trust grant. Parnell explains:
"I spent a long time going on safaris, not just watching the animals, but watching people watch the animals, and actively doing research for this next set of artwork. Two ‘eureka’ experiences came out of that for me:
"I realized, one day, sitting in a land rover in Botswana, after having been on so many of these excursions, that I had never said to myself ‘Wow, I have never seen this before!’ Instead, with each new wildlife sighting, I was saying to myself ‘Wow, that's just like it is on television!’ I realized that the primordial African landscape is already there, inside our heads, not because of some woo-woo genetic memory, but because we have seen it all on the National Geographic channel, or on "Wild Kingdom" or a PBS documentary. Seeing it in person is not much more than a confirmation of its conformity to the model we have in our heads -- and is generally less action-packed, to boot.
"One day I found myself in the National Museum of Natural History in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. I had, only a few weeks before, seen the equivalent museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Both countries share the same basic fauna, but in the Cape Town museum, the animals are all in separate glass cases, neatly categorized by species, and all standing at attention in neat rows. In Maputo, they are in an open-air diorama that resembles a passion play, or something from Bosch: a wild orgy of bloodshed on the savannah: lions attack the zebras, there is fake blood everywhere, and the herd of elephants stampedes in terror at the mayhem.
"If one considers the history of each nation -- Apartheid in South Africa, following years of colonial rule by an orderly British Empire, vs. centuries of abuse and slave trade in Mozambique at the hands of the Portuguese, followed by decades of civil war, one sees immediately the implications and the subconscious mental modeling going on in both cases. The animals are made to enact what is going on, or has been going on, in the societies (and heads) of the people who prepare them."
Parnell’s show at Zeitgeist runs Dec. 7 to Jan. 3. There will be a reception Thursday, Dec. 7 from 6 to 8 p.m. More information on the artist is available at www.eugeneparnell.com.
© 2006 by Alec Clayton