Sherry Parker has been working in the collage medium since 1987 and has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Pasadena, Seattle, Santa Fe, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley and throughout Northern California.
In the artist's words, "My work has been reviewed as an “intense response to the poetics of life suspended between the real and the surreal" – driven by polarizing passions: poetic flights of imagination and scientific precision.
"Collage is an adventure; a happening. The fascination for me is chance; the catharsis: discovery. As the Dadaists and Surrealists realized, collage is fueled by the unconscious. This is what excites me about this medium: the ideas which flow from chance, from a serendipitous discovery and from the spontaneous (frequently unconscious) combining of textures and images from objets trouvés and out-of-print materials.
"The lyrical vocabulary of my work reflects my playfully irreverent response to – or perhaps refuge from – the 'furious folly' of these times. This can be seen in unexpected and nonsensical imagery, deconstruction and humanization of machines, and in anthropomorphic hybrids. My work is my way of softening the rough edges of the world around me and making my peace with it."
Parker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles and a diplome in French from the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 2010-2012, she originated, curated, and directed a two-year project called EXCOR, Revival of Exquisite Corpse, which included 34 Northern California artists who collaboratively created 50 EXCORS. EXCOR was exhibited in Santa Rosa, Berkeley, and in a John Cage tribute invitational at SOMArts in San Francisco called, "Get Lucky, the Culture of Chance." To document this revival, Parker wrote and published an 80-page limited edition book that features the history of Exquisite Corpse, documents this revival, and includes color plates of all 50 EXCORS.
