Review

A review of Restoration: Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City, Missouri
October 11, 2008 - February 8, 2009

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison's "Pollination" is part of their mid-career survey, "Restoration," on view at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, through February 8. Image details: 1998, gelatin silver print with mixed media, 26" x 47". Gift of Hallmark cards. All images provided courtesy of the artists

Restoration: Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison is an overview of the artists’ photography career during the past decade. Early works from 1998 and the most recent images from 2006 have a constant underlying theme: the challenges of healing a broken land and a society that Everyman must face in a world of desolation and solitude.

In (nearly) each image, the Everyman, played by Robert ParkeHarrison, struggles to find the balance between the isolation of his existence with the nearly unbearable conditions he faces within his environment. At times, Everyman is faced with the overwhelming remains of human carelessness, such as mountainous piles of debris and junk; other times he tries to heal a barren landscape with strange inventions that inevitably never work.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, "Flying Lesson", 2000, photogravure with beeswax, 20 1/2" x 18 1/4"; Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

Though the images most likely represent a troubled future for human existence, the techniques that the ParkeHarrisons apply to each image, as well as the props created for each scene, lend nostalgia, as if the viewer were peering through a window during the Dust Bowl. The tools used by Everyman seem to come from a pre-Industrial Revolution era; as viewers, we feel the disconnection between Everyman, his knowledge of previous technology, and the strange primitive tools he creates to deal with his dreadful challenges.Viewers feel the sand and grit filling their lungs while observing Flying Lesson from the series entitled Earth Elegies, dusty and bleak and displayed in stunning sepia tones. In this particularly poetic image, Everyman watches and hopes to help his many crows relearn to fly. Of course, he may learn to fly from this lesson, too — though we watch him knowing his plan will only lead to failure.

In Flying Lesson, Everyman ties himself to the birds with twine. The crows are "free" but leashed, and if a sense of freedom exists from the un-caged bird, this ideology does not apply here. The environment is bleak with no trees for the birds’ retreat; a dull gray sky and a dusty dirty ground remain. In many ways, the content Earth Elegies offers is a severe warning to current human existence, asking us to beware of the unnecessary waste and neglect of the land and animals as we use them today.

The ParkeHarrsions painstakingly create each negative and each set to produce unique images; their exclusive techniques involve painting, sculpture, prop design, and performance. Though the preparation of sets, printing, and finishing of each image is so laborious and the photographs are striking with their sepias and beeswax, the images beg viewers to focus on content rather than process. The addition of a polychrome color palette in the most recent images of the ParkeHarrisons’ work in the exhibition shows that the artists continue to introduce other techniques.

Thin sheets of metal are used to print the colorful images instead of the monochrome photogravures from earlier series. Like the processes, Everyman figure seems to evolve, too. He has built himself a home where he keeps butterflies and may have electricity in Mourning Cloak. The introduction of color somehow creates an extra sense of hope as well: seeing the colorful wings on each butterfly is more hopeful than seeing dusty landscapes. -re-

A version of this review appears in the January / February 2009 print issue of Review magazine.