Parker Ito (American, b. 1986) is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, video, installation, printmaking, drawing, websites, NFTs and books, treating the connections between these forms as much a subject as any single piece. Rooted in an early internet art community, he explores the unstable flow of meaning at the points where interior and exterior worlds absorb, digest and reformat each other.
Ito grew up in Seal Beach, California, and first gained attention while studying at California College of the Arts in Oakland, painting the “parked domain girl”, a stock placeholder image found on unbuilt web addresses, rendered in styles ranging from street-art wheatpaste to anime. He has worked under pseudonyms including Deke McLelland Two, Creamy Dreamy and Parker Cheeto, and often hires skilled studio assistants to realize his concepts, at times crediting them as the show's artists, as at a 2014 exhibition at White Cube in London. His 2014 show “A Lil Taste of Cheeto in the Night”, staged in a 7,800-square-foot Los Angeles warehouse, was the culmination of a yearlong, multi-part series that had opened with an anonymous exhibition of rose still lifes in an Atwater Village cafe.
Ito's rise was closely tied to the post-internet art movement of the early 2010s, and he was later associated with the market's Zombie Formalism boom.In 2025 he began releasing NFT collections that channel that earlier maximalist absorption of internet imagery into collage-based PFP projects. Profile Pictures, made with ID Xanthrax, traces the three-quarter portrait format common to NFT PFPs back to Raphael's Pope Julius II, as reiterated by Titian and later distorted by Francis Bacon, breaking the composition down into reusable traits.Heavy Liquid Graphic, made with Evil Biscuit, is a Halloween-themed collection that runs vintage photographs and Ito's own imagery through a GAN to produce jagged, horror-tinged overlays, part of the maximalist “schizocollage” NFT scene on the platform vvv.so.,
