photo Simon Beckmann
“Joya: AiR is spare and nearly silent in October. Located in Almería at the eastern extreme of Andalucía, its valleys extend like long stairways, alternating dwarf pines with almond orchards. I feel privileged to have worked on a couple of projects suggested by this setting at the cortijada Simon and Donna have restored in beautiful regional style.
Here, I found an intimate, light-filled courtyard to set up “Water Trick.” This installation, in which glasses of water are suspended upside down on a pane of glass, relates to the complex methods of channeling water to agricultural and urban centers in semi-arid regions like Almería and Southern California. The “trick” is to trap a measure of water, which creates a mirror-like effect on the multicolored glasses. However visually alluring on the surface, the floating table is ephemeral and ultimately subject to failure in the same way that lush gardens and oasis-like golf courses conjured from semi-desert are unsustainable.
My other project involved constituting the local soil to clay, which I worked into portraits of historical and fictional characters, including Hamda bint Ziyad, one of medieval Andalucía’s foremost women poets. Hermenegildo, a Jamaican subject adopted and highly educated by a childless plantation owner, emerged from the clay next. I also sculpted the woman for whom Francisco de Quevedo’s flame swam cold water and Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, possibly the final descendent of a Nasrid subject who fled Granada in 1492. I left this gallery of characters near a furrowed field where they are gradually going back to dust”.
Carolie Parker is a visual artist and writer with a background in foreign languages and art history. Along with studying studio art and Spanish literature at UC Irvine, she earned an MA in comparative literature at UCLA (Latin American, US and French poetry). Her poetry has come out most recently in Sixth Finch, The Yale Review and Denver Quarterly. What Books Press published Mirage Industry, a book-length collection of her work, in 2016. In 2019, the Fellows of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) selected her for a Curator’s Lab Award, which funded Medium, an exhibition focusing on the relationship between language and visual image. Her visual work has been shown at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LAVA Projects, The Armory Center for the Arts and 515 at the Bendix Building among others; residencies include a MacDowell Fellowship and three weeks as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.