Parker Day (b. 1984) photographs invented and real characters in richly saturated colour on 35mm film, exploring how identity is built and performed through costume and persona.,,She builds her images with makeup and costumes pulled from her own closet, staging portraits that recall the flat lighting and intimacy of a photobooth.
Day was born in San Jose, California, in 1984and studied photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco from 2002 to 2005, leaving before completing the program.,After moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles in 2015, she began photographing local subjects in the saturated style that would define her work.That work grew into ICONS, a series of 100 studio portraits blurring real and invented characters, which premiered in a solo exhibition at Superchief Gallery in Los Angeles in 2017,and was published as a monograph by Not a Cult the same year.,
In Possession, published by Not a Cult in November 2018 and shown in solo exhibitions at Superchief Gallery in New York, Miami and Los Angeles the following year,Day settled on 46 final images — the number of chromosomes in a human cell — treating simple bodily concepts such as disease, hunger and surgery in vivid, exaggerated colour.Around the same time she developed Brand Partner, a series of faux advertisements for everyday products such as Gushers and Rush poppers that she posted to Instagram as a kind of performance art, testing whether viewers could tell art from advertising.
Day extended her film-based practice into digital art, releasing ICONS as an NFT collection in 2022 in partnership with Quantum Art.In 2024 she partnered with Casey Rodarmor, the inventor of the Ordinals protocol, to create FUN!, a collection of 1,000 un-edited 35mm film portraits inscribed directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, a series that descends directly from Inscription 0, the first inscription made under the protocol.Day began shooting the series before becoming pregnant and continued through her pregnancy, completing the final sessions with her newborn son, Phoenix Rose, on set in her living room.
Day has also had solo exhibitions at Peyer Fine Art in Zurich and Niggeler Urban Contemporary in St Moritz, Switzerland,and her photographs have appeared in publications including Vogue Italia, Juxtapoz and Dazed.
