Name: Yeshe Parks
Born: Rocky Ford, CO
Lives and works: Santa Fe, NM
Instagram: @yeeesshh
In Yeshe Parks’s gouache-on-paper paintings, figures perform impossible acrobatics. Knees and elbows bend in perfect U-shapes as cartoon-like, faceless characters contort and intertwine themselves into arbitrary postures. These bendy bodies appear to commune with one another in some silent, body-driven language. In Gradient Beings, twenty-four identical men with blue pants, pink socks, and golden floral tops bend in perfect arcs to create a human tunnel. In Yin’ing, two figures, one in red floral, the other in gold, float mid-air, their zig-zaggy bodies forming a human yin yang. These anonymous figures, in their repetitious absurd posturing, playfully caricature the imperfect and opaque means by which humans attempt to understand one another, even on the smallest levels. While bridging the gaps of human communication feels weighty (and sometimes hopeless in our current cultural moment), in Parks’s work his commitment to serialized pattern and shape injects levity and hope: at least we’re all alone together.
Yeshe Parks grew up in rural Maine running around in the woods and blueberry farming. Drawn to cultural intersections and easy access to nature, he and his partner have landed in Santa Fe.
