Parker Ito

Life

Parker Ito was born in 1986 in Long Beach, California, and raised in Long Beach, California. His mother was a hairdresser and is now a radiologic technician, his father works for an oil company. When Ito was younger he acted, and sang on television. Before becoming a professional artist he aspired to become a professional skateboarder and held a job painting oil derricks in Los Angeles.

Persona

Ito functions under many pseudonyms such as Deke McLelland Two, Creamy Dreamy, and Parker Cheeto, among others. He uses these for different bodies of work as a way of complicating authorship. His practice aims to challenge authorship and authenticity in many ways. Parker has said that many of his past interviews were delivered by someone operating in his place over email.

Ito has a unique persona that he enacts in photographs, and videos in which he is seen wearing high-end designer suits or skateboarding through his studio. His personal photographs are often manipulated to have further graphics added to them and deemed new works of art.

Production

Ito's working style involves hiring paid assistants to produce works. He insists on paying them a fair wage and allows for the produced works to be made in the style of the hired hand. This strategy was used in Ito's body of work The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet, a project created while he was still attending California College of the Arts in Oakland. For this work, a popular stock photo which features a young girl wearing a backpack on a college campus was manually reproduced and manipulated through painting in several different styles and interpretations. The lack of a cohesive visual style has become synonymous with Ito's practice.

The use of hired hands was also notably used to produce the works shown at White Cube gallery in London for his exhibition Part 2: Nora Berman, Blackwidow LA, Parker Cheeto, Carey Garris, Justin John Greene, Celia Hollander, Daniel Lane, Lee Marshall and Orion Martin: Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem), 2014. In this show, all of his assistants received credit as artists within the exhibition, leading people to believe it was a group exhibition.

Conceptual Concerns

Ito has said that he is not concerned about maintaining ownership over ideas or stylistic decisions in a period where information sharing is ubiquitous. He is a champion of the Internet and believes that the spreading of ideas is the primary purpose of its existence.

The primary concerns of his art practice are authorship and authenticity, technical reproduction, professionalization and corporatization of art, the affect of overwhelm, and the role and influence of the Internet on contemporary culture.

Career

Parker Ito is represented by Château Shatto, a Los Angeles-based art gallery co-owned by Nelson Harmon and Liv Barrett, Ito's relationship partner and dealer, and Team Gallery in New York.

Solo Exhibitions

Ito has been exhibited internationally. The following is a list of solo exhibitions.

Collaborations

Ito has collaborated with many artists, such as Body by Body (Melissa Sachs, Cameron Soren), Chris Coy, Caitlin Denny, Jon Rafman, Tabor Robak, Micah Schippa, John Transue, and Artie Vierkant.

Art Market

Parker Ito was one of 30 or so unestablished artists that was discovered by the notorious art-flipper Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz met Ito in 2009, alongside Jon Rafman and Artie Vierkant, claiming “In all of these guys, I identified the makings of a movement.” When Simchowitz first purchased work by Parker he was still a student at CCA and had a day job painting oil derricks. By February 2014 Ito's work was able to sell in a London auction for $93,594, well above the estimated high of $25,000. And in a July auction for over 80,000. Since Ito’s relationship with Simchowitz however, Ito has been the subject of much skepticism. His following 13 auction results averaged at $30,000 per piece or had works unsold. Prior to his work entering the auction market, Ito actively distanced himself from Simchowitz recognizing that he did not want to participate in a market-driven art system—one that views artwork primarily as a commodity. He is represented by Nelson Harmon and Liv Barrett, of Château Shatto and José Freire of Team Gallery.