“The dense field of marks that populate the surface of Mark Parsons’ printed paper series triggers images of ancient markings from some mythical archaeological find. A closer reading reveals the machining of ready-made imagery, the transferred palimpsest of routing paths produced by contemporary laser cuts. Among the list of citable comparative precedents, cuneiform tablets, the Nazca lines, astronomical or meteorological maps, records of accelerated atomic collisions, the printing press, it is Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s visionary Carceri series that seems most kindred. The now familiar revolutionary spatial and representational inventions of the prison series call to mind the relationship of method, product and content and the role of the print. Both are refreshingly put in question in both the Piranesian and Parsonsian production.”
Anthony Caradonna
“…The work has a canny quality - Parsons pays attention, he attends the work of the work, so to speak, his own and that of the subjects he surveys and assists. The results are quite compelling and cryptic: tangled figures, traces of meaningful and random operations, palimpsests, encoded representations that have happened at a distance from the artist but to which the artist has given visibility and presence. It is as if some meaning - of collective artistic labor, of lines left over from technical work, of translations with missing words, of compositional accidents - has been drawn from a hidden place and displayed. We knew it was there, but hadn’t realized what it might look like.”
Catherine Ingraham