Anna Park (b. 1996, Daegu South Korea; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) makes charcoal drawings that teeter between abstraction and figuration, with imagery that homes in on the turbulent and frenzied contemporary experience. Beginning each canvas as an improvisational mark-making dance, Park composes scenes that are gestural snapshots of an over-exposed and self-aware human condition – universal moments and interpersonal exchanges she often laces with signifiers of today’s zeitgeist. In black-and-white works that recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and radical fragmentation of Cubism, moments collapse into speed streaks, limbs grasp for one another, and glimpses of familiar faces emerge.
Park is from South Korea but spent her formative years in the US state of Utah – an experience that often positioned her on the outside, looking in. This early lesson in observing from a voyeur’s distance permeates Park’s works today, with an interest and sharp eye for the deep emotive range of the human subject. With visual allegory, recurrent archetypes, and tripes of Americana, Park articulates inner conflict, shame, longing, growth, and mortality within her swirling abstracted tableaus.