Laura Parnes’ critically acclaimed films and installations craft loose narratives of trauma and repressed memory around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage. She has screened and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; Brooklyn Museum; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; The International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and on PBS and Spanish television. Recently she had solo exhibitions at LA><, LA, Participant Inc., Fitzroy Gallery; and solo screenings at the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Kitchen in New York. Parnes is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and a 2016 Creative Capital Awardee. Video Data Bank published a boxed set of her work, and Participant Press published a book of her scripts titled Blood and Guts in Hollywood: Two Screenplays.
At MacDowell, she wrote a script for a multi-platform installation that references the Western film genre while ruminating on the ways 1800 century historic narratives have been reabsorbed through popular culture. Her recent multi-platform project "Tour Without End" was exhibited widely, including at The Kitchen, Human Resources in Los Angeles, and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.
Portrait by Alice O'Malley
