The End Is Near

By Elaine Parks

For the past year and a half, I had been working on a show that was to be installed at the Oats Park Art Center in Fallon, Nevada, opening on August 22, 2020.

Only a few weeks before the opening we postponed the show, which has now been rescheduled for April 9 - June 18, 2022. This felt both very necessary and very disappointing.

Something interesting happened as a result, which I’m sure is happening to artists everywhere during COVID-19.

Like most artists, I work right up till the last moment, pack and install, then really see the work for the first time in a gallery.

This year, I am able to hang the work on my studio walls and start to just live with it. This has been a pretty involved process of storing older work to make enough room for the new work. I have a good sized studio, but nowhere near the size of the gallery at Oats Park. So I find myself changing the arrangement on the wall as the new work interacts with old and pieces are combining and recombining and letting this new work take over the studio.

Of course I knew cancellation was a distinct possibility as I was working this spring. This created an odd back and forth energy in the studio, wondering while I was working if the show was going to happen. Now that it’s hanging on my wall, I feel like I can establish a different relationship with the work—being able to consider the next pieces that will be in the series with the work in front of me. Usually this process would happen much, much later. I can now take my time with this work—that’s a novel feeling—and kind of a bonus that I wasn’t expecting.

The theme of the work is inspired by my love of nature and the dire state of our earth.

The title is The End is Near, thinking of the funny doomsday cartoon. We love this idea, and it keeps making appearances, but this time around, it’s the truth—we’re on the brink of irreversible changes.

I come from Los Angeles and have lived on and off (currently on) in extremely rural Tuscarora, Nevada, for the past 20 years.

When I first arrived in Tuscarora at the beginning of the millennium, it was Y2K (The End is Near). A far less serious crisis than the one we’re in now and a time that was noticeably cooler, greener and wetter—only 20 years ago.

The End is Near has several parallel series.

This spring there were many dead birds. In the country you see a lot of dead things, but the number of dead birds this year seemed exceptional. I had already started making falling birds as a symbol of the degradation of nature. Made from clay, to look like wood. The birds appear to be assembled from sticks.

There’s a huge wall in the gallery at Oats Park, I had visualized this big wall of falling birds. Some of the birds are flying, some of the owls. These are made in a more solid form. They might escape. Though not all the owls are quite right.

Landscape skulls- clay skulls created by using real skulls as a hump mold—abstracting the form, by obscuring some of the detail. These are painted using ceramic materials. The images are all places I’ve camped or spent time. I find these landscapes particularly beautiful. I photograph and draw them and use some of these drawings on the skulls. The skulls could be found in such landscapes. And the landscape serves as a kind of camouflage for the animal, blending into the landscape as protection.

The night sky pieces are all older pieces that I like with the birds and skulls. They are round and shaped portraits of the huge night sky—a phenomenon we have in abundance in Tuscarora. Here is a universe where we are possibly unique, that gave rise to us and that if we can see, we see in the same way as our distant collective ancestors.

Even with many cancelled plans, I feel busier than I ever have.

I spend a lot of time in the studio making things to feed my Etsy shop. I make beads and charms and animals and magical creatures. Business is busy and therapeutic. I make tiny things for simple joy and send them out in the world to appreciative customers. I am grateful for this, as it provides a lot of focus with direct and immediate feedback.

As a very active board member of the Tuscarora Pottery School, I’m involved with planning for next year and really hope that we’ll be able to hold our classes and events. Instead of classes this year, I have organized a couple of school clean-ups and have been pursuing grants. I know all organizations are in this same situation, planning for an unknown future—hoping that we will be able to return to some kind of normal.

The uncertain future is exhausting. I feel a pressure to connect in new ways, when my capacity for more doesn’t feel overlarge at the moment.

I find myself wanting it to be next year so I can know that politics will be going in a better direction. And that maybe, just maybe, we will make the changes we must make or it will be too late.

In the meantime, I am grateful to be so busy—it keeps me from succumbing to hopelessness. The world in distress seeps into everything and staying busy is a useful distraction.

I don’t think I’ll really know what’s going on until I get the perspective of time, and I can look back at this strange time.

A native of Los Angeles, Elaine Parks received her MFA from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1999. Feeling the need to have a very different life experience, she relocated to extreme rural Nevada, where the sparse landscape’s elusive beauty shaped her ideas about the human relationship to the environment. Elaine likes to say she moved from a town of 14 million to a town of 14. During a decade in Nevada, she exhibited at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Oats Park Gallery, Fallon, Barrick Museum, Las Vegas, and Sierra Arts and Holland Project, Reno. Elaine taught for seven years at Great Basin College and twice received the prestigious Fellowship Award from the Nevada Arts Council.

Elaine returned to Los Angeles to care for elderly parents in 2009. While in LA, she showed locally with Antebellum Gallery, NewTown Pasadena, Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, and LA Artcore. In 2010, Elaine curated a pop-up exhibition with 24 artists, music, and performance events called pLAyLAnd. Nationally and internationally, Elaine participated in LA Contraventions in Germany and Cryptographics: a tribute to the Voynich Manuscript at the EXPO Chicago, and, online is part of Telephone: An International Arts Experiment, presented by the Satellite Collective. Elaine designed sets and costumes for Cabaret Revoltaire: 100 Years of Dada, a performance event at ArtShareLA. Elaine is thrilled to be mostly back in Nevada, her spiritual home.

Kathleen KuoFebruary 1, 2021EComment