an exhibition

As an installation made specifically for this exhibition, Mark Parson’s Collaborative Portrait is an abstracted group portrait of the students behind the exhibition. Parsons often relies on an element of collaboration to create portraits of demographic or intellectual networks. For this work, participants were asked to provide two images that were then translated into line drawings, superimposed on top of one another, and projected within the gallery, then realized by inviting participants to collectively trace and map out lines from the projection to create an abstract representation from the original images. The two images provided by each contributor included one image on social media networks they wish they could remove, and one image they would never want circulated on any network. The resulting work is a construction of erased moments that unite the contributors in a portrait of their concealed private images.