Laura Parnes
Brooklyn, NY
Laura Parnes’ work engages in strategies of narrative and experimental film and video art to craft loose narratives of trauma and repressed memory around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage. Using historical, literary and popular culture based references she addresses issues related to cultural production and societal malaise.
Laura Parnes has screened and exhibited her work widely in both the U.S. and internationally, including venues such as the MoMA, Participant Inc., The Kitchen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands, Light Industry, Brooklyn, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Whitney Museum. Parnes received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and has lectured as a visiting artist at numerous institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University and Yale University. Video Data Bank published a box set of her work with an essay by Chris Kraus in 2014.
From the Journal
- The Energy of Artist-Run Spaces and Music Venues Captured by Laura Parnes September 21, 2021
Events
- Tour Without End: Screening and Performance November 12, 2021
Tour Without End
Laura Parnes makes work that engages in strategies of narrative and experimental film, and video art to craft loose narratives of trauma and repressed memory around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage.
Artist BioTour Without End is a hybrid-film installation and an archive of DIY venues for visual and performing arts, in New York City and beyond. It is a multi-platform project in which real-life musicians, artists and actors are cast as alternate-universe-rock star versions of themselves. A core group of players improvise based on semi-scripted scenes. Many of these outsized performers are legendary personalities in the history of DIY venues for visual and performing arts in NYC and beyond. As the players move in and out of fictionalized characters and real life, the film moves in and out of non-linear narrative and historical documentation.
The work centers on the fictional band “Munchausen,” and revels in their complex band dynamics as they endure the strain of touring, collaborating and the process of aging while immersed in a youth driven DIY music scene. Six-hours of live performances at numerous underground venues are featured.