NARA PARK: PRESENCE | VISARTS

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Nara Park’s newest body of work, Presence, features free-standing sculptures composed of tiny painted Styrofoam beads imitating grains of sand. The microbeads form masses evoking markers or monuments. Park explores how monuments and sculpture mark space, time, and place. She considers how their “presence” serves to replace or remind us of the physical presence of a person or an event.

Park dyed the beads with acrylic paint and glued them together with archival adhesive. The accumulation of beads in multiple colors creates the illusion of disintegrating surfaces or the build-up of lichen, mold, or coral. Upon close examination of the works, the grains are visible and appear to coalesce in organic growth patterns. Most of the sculptures are hollow emphasizing that there is a void under the surface of a monumental structure.

Hollowness coexists with bulk, physical lightness with visual weight, emptiness yet immanence. They are only surfaces, but they suggest solids. In contrast to the monument as symbol of strength, stability, and permanence, Park’s monuments reference the fragility of life and the passage of time. From tiny particles and illusion emerges a larger whole, glowing with individuality and undeniable presence.

“My work investigates our relationship to the landscape we live in and the imprint we leave in it when we are gone.”- Nara Park