charcoal allows me to see my ideas come to life as soon as I conceive them…
“I feel as though the reason why I keep gravitating towards those mediums is because the immediacy of charcoal allows me to see my ideas come to life as soon as I conceive them,” Park says. “I sometimes make preliminary sketches prior to going into a piece, but for the
most part, I like to start drawing right away when the concept is fresh in my mind. The charcoal allows me to produce a wide range of values within the pace I enjoy to work in. And being a rather simple and straightforward medium, it challenges me to push the possible capabilities that it can offer visually.”
In the beginning of work on a scene, the artist keeps it “very loose and gestural in the beginning, to not lose the feeling of movement throughout the piece.” And unlike her seventeenth-century predecessors, the web now provides an endless trove of source material for the artist to then pull details from. She finds herself digging through “cheesy” and “awful” stock images and memes in her journey down internet rabbit holes. It is these touches that allow her work to feel wholly contemporary and universal at the same time. “I find it funny how searching up such benign statements on the internet provides you with an endless amount of unexpected, at times disturbing, content,” she says. “I pick and choose what aspects of different photos that I like and integrate my imagination into them.”
This specific body of work has grown just over the couple years of the artist’s collegiate career. Those studies began with a stint at New York’s Pratt Institute in 2015, with the artist moving onto her current school and this summer, onto Leipzig for a residency. (She then has one more year left at the New York Academy of Art.) During that time, the awards have stacked up: Utah State Sterling Scholar for Visual Arts, a Foundation Merit Award, a Drawing Scholar Award. A recent social media shout-out from KAWS was the latest in peer recognition. And her work has been found in group shows like Women in Spaces: Past / Present at FIX Collaborative and Drawn Together Again at Flag Art Foundation. All of these suggest that Park’s crowded drawings carry weight among any crowds finding their way to her work.
Yet what the artist is exploring in her party scenes is more than just our most extraverted lives. They are also insular explorations, a look at how we all change within the many backdrops of our lives. “In any situation that we are placed in, people tend to shift into different versions of themselves,” she has written. “Whether it be to assimilate to the surroundings around us, or how our environment influences us subconsciously, it’s our own way of adapting. Having moved around for the majority of my childhood, I was making constant adjustments to the new settings I was presented with. What I didn’t realize at the time was the fact that not only were the places I inhabited changing, but my own outlook and perceptions on life were being transformed.”*
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