Today we’d like to introduce you to Kate Parsons.
Kate, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I’m an only child and grew up in rural Montana. Like many young artists, I spent a lot of time by myself, drawing. Comics and people, mostly. My mother was very good about making sure that we had a pretty up-to-date tech in the house, so I was always making things with new design software. (I started a newsletter in 3rd grade with the wide distribution of 5 close friends.) We were one of the first families in our area to have internet, a period of my life I remember very fondly–it was when I suddenly felt connected to the outside world when I suddenly felt less alone. When I was young, I recall my mom helping me find a pen pal on a BBS (Bulletin Board System) called Big Sky Telegraph, an initiative to bring internet to rural areas in the late 80s, early 90s. My work is still mainly about place and connection, and I suppose I trace it back to that.
I attended Montana State University for my undergraduate studies, where I studied art, graphic design, and minored in Religious Studies–another subject matter that strongly informs my practice. I spent my 20s mostly working in advertising and design, looking to publications like Res magazine to keep me inspired. (I had always been attracted to motion graphics and lens-based work, but I was mostly trained in print.) I also knew that one day I’d live in either New York or Los Angeles, but it wasn’t until my late twenties that I finally landed near LA. I attended graduate school for my MA at CSU-Northridge, where I studied video art with incredible professors like Dr. Ron Saito and Samantha Fields. I then went straight into UCLA’s Media Arts program for my MFA, where I focused on themes of mourning and loss as expressed through the moving image. It’s also where I was able to study with folks like Jennifer Steinkamp, Casey Reas, Erkki Huhtamo, and Peter Lunenfeld, all of whom greatly shaped what my work has become. UCLA was also where I returned to working in library archives, which is another story in and of itself.
A few years ago, I co-founded FLOAT, a VR studio with my partner Ben Vance. It was born out of trying to spatialize some of my video work inside VR, an experiment that grew into a much greater collaborative effort. We began bringing other artists’ work into VR, with the belief that experimentation is what will push the medium forward. Most recently, we’ve collaborated with Petra Cortright on a VR piece and received some support last year to create prototypes with Casey Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp, Megan Daalder, filmmaker Mark Pellington, and architect Kerenza Harris. Our studio’s latest project, Screensavers VR, is made up of many different collaborations from critical essays to virtual artwork.
FEMMEBIT, a video art festival, and my other passion project, is also about collaboration and connection–specifically within the video art community here in LA. Long story short, it grew out of an idea I had in grad school, around 2014. I was surrounded by incredible video artists in the local scene here and sought to find a way to celebrate their work, but wasn’t positioned to take on such a big project at the time. In 2015, Sharsten Plenge and Janna Avner joined the effort to birth what we now know as FEMMEBIT. Our most recent festival took place this past May, and was produced with Sharsten, Janna, Dahn Gim, Richelle Gribble and Eva Aguila. I’m currently working on a more detailed history of our website, femmebit.art. Take a look if you’re ever curious!
In addition to FEMMEBIT and FLOAT, I’m currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pepperdine University and an instructor at Art Center College of Design in the Media Design Practices MFA program. I feel very fortunate to be around many incredible students and brilliant colleagues.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I refer to myself as a media artist because I’ve been moving between video, VR, and experimental animation in recent years. Technically, this means I’m shooting and editing video and photos, experimenting with the capture and mixing processes, and working with game engines like Unity. On some upcoming projects, I’ll be returning to my roots withdrawing and handmade work. I’ve also been focusing on curation with both FLOAT and FEMMEBIT.
With FLOAT, the collaboration is generally between my partner Ben and myself, both on the technical and artistic side, using game engines to create the virtual work. FEMMEBIT, which has become a platform of sorts, is also very much a result of team efforts. As mentioned before, when I first moved to LA and became embedded in the scene, I was struck by how universally respected the female video artists in the community were. People like Suzy Poling and JJ Stratford–they were such masters of their domain, and everyone recognized it. It was glorious! It’s not that sexism didn’t exist in the space, but that community seemed immune to a lot of it. It was so beautiful and worth celebrating! Ghosting. TV, Experimental Half Hour, and Prism Pipe were all very active around this time, and I wanted to create something that bolstered what they had already started. How could we showcase and promote all the important work that they and so many other incredible women were doing?
There’s something very special about the scene in LA–the confluence of the art world and the film, animation, game and music industries, plus all the art schools and universities in the area. There’s a vast pool of incredibly talented individuals doing work both inside and outside the studio system, and so many of them are female and female-identifying. It took a few years to figure out how to make the festival a real thing, and I’m so thankful for everyone who has had a part in making it a reality. I’m excited to see how we can grow, evolve and ultimately improve our ability to support these artists.
As far as a takeaway from my work, I think it’s the importance of place and connection–connection to one another, to the deepest parts of ourselves, and to our environment. I’m personally inspired by some heavy hitters like Pipilotti Rist, Mike Kelly, Camille Henrot, Martine Syms, and Pierre Hughye. I love seeing artists move fluidly between mediums. I’m also inspired, of course, by all our FEMMEBIT and FLOAT artists and places like Coaxial and Machine Project (RIP). Machine let artists experiment, play, and discover new modes of expression––and they ultimately helped many artists find kindred spirits in one another.
My work might feature various things like flowers, gardens, cemeteries, found footage, humor, games and even music videos–but it’s fundamentally about these two main concerns: Connection and place. How can we explore our relationship to ourselves, to one another, to our time on this planet? The VR work––even the parodies––are, at their core, about that.
How can artists connect with other artists?
It can be incredibly lonely and alienating. We’re all working so hard to keep afloat, and as we all know, Los Angeles is quite vast. If you don’t live on the same side of town as a friend, you very well might go months without seeing each other. This can happen even when you live in the same neighborhood.
There are many contributing factors to this loneliness, but one of them is our work habits. Many of us are perpetually stressed trying to find sustainable work–It might be worse in places like LA where the hustle is built into the industries we inhabit. The gig economy is in full swing, and everyone has a side hustle and, therefore, zero extra time for anything else. When you find yourself in a similar situation, just know that you’re not alone. I’m fortunate in that I see my colleagues and students at school, so that keeps me at least a little bit socialized. However, we’ve been in hard mode with this last project and haven’t seen anyone else hardly at all. It’s been quite depressing. Thankfully, we’re starting to emerge from that a little bit and have been making a concerted effort to spend time with friends and others in the community who we’d like to become closer with.
I have an existential crisis almost weekly about this, so I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with the topic. That loneliness leads to depression which makes it hard to find meaningful connections and sustainable work, which makes you even more depressed and lonely. It’s an awful cycle!
The period after graduate school was extremely difficult for me emotionally and financially. I fought my way through it with freelance work and teaching, but I can’t emphasize how hard it was. At one point I was driving all over LA county, teaching at five different schools, and was dealing with serious depression. One of the things that helped me crawl out of it was a friend passing off some freelance work to me. That job helped me pay my bills that month, and I felt emotionally supported through her kind gesture. I try to pay it forward by farming out work that comes to me through FEMMEBIT. This has happened multiple times, and my hope is that those in our network feel supported. I mean, that is also one of the reasons FEMMEBIT exists. We see you, out there…making all that incredible work. Let’s all gather together and celebrate it!
So, my advice is to reach out to your friends and community members, even––and maybe even especially––if you don’t feel up to it. Your circle cares about you. They’re the ones who can remind you of your priorities: Why do you make the work you do? Why is it important that you continue to make it? Your friends and colleagues can help you see a clearer picture of yourself, your situation, and your work. Also, try collaborating with a friend on something, even a small project. I think it’s especially relevant if you find yourself lonely, low on funds, demoralized, depressed, or all of the above. It involves the willingness to make yourself vulnerable to others, but odds are, at least one of your friends is going through something similar. I’m reminded of some of the work Machine Project would do, like workshops on starting a gallery in your closet. Collaborate on a show, start something new. Sometimes you need that outside influence to help you change your perspective.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
With FEMMEBIT, we are still active between festivals, with things like visuals at LACMA’s Muse Til Midnight, residencies at Dublab, Spring Break Art Fair (with Supercollider Gallery), and other events and showcases around town. Keep an eye out for us!
Much of FLOAT’s work is best suited to a gallery setting, and we have a few shows lined up this Spring. You can find us at Bridge Projects in March, the Carnegie Art Museum February 1st, and the Mike Kelly Gallery at Beyond Baroque on February 9th. I’ll also be headed to SXSW in March to talk about some of my research in the VR space. Our work with FLOAT is really focused on keeping that part of our art practice sustainable. We do take client projects, but we’re trying to find ways of funding our artwork using commercial avenues. Our Screensavers piece is an experiment, an attempt to make and sell work within the gaming industry’s pre-existing model. It’s delightfully strange and is still finding it is home–part-parody, part-media history, with a heavy dose of remix theory and nostalgia. We’re also working with a number of collaborators, including game historians, animators, and guest artists, so I’m excited to see where the project will go.
As far as how people can support the work, I think about that daily! Screensavers is transmedia: Part VR, part AR, and will end by becoming a book. However, the first phase of it is strictly VR, so we’re at a disadvantage since few people actually have headsets. We’re hoping that people will still find value in our mission and what we’re trying to do, and will, therefore, support it either by buying the app (the AR version is soon to be available on Google Play) or even donating a few dollars via our Cash App so we can continue the research and production. This is an art game, a platform, and a repository for artistic research about the early internet. And we’re making it with essentially no budget because we believe in it and what it will become. We hope others do, too.
That said, I also appreciate it when people just show up. It’s important for everyone–see each other’s work, come to each other’s events. Make an effort. It’s Los Angeles, so it’s notoriously difficult to make everyone’s opening, but do your best and support your friends and those in the community.
I’ve been out of studio-visit mode while we’ve been working on the Screensavers game, so I’m excited to get back to that and start showing some of my solo work a bit more. I love visiting with other artists and finding ways we can support one another’s visions… So invite me to your studio!
Contact Info:
- Website: kateparsons.art
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @parsonsprojects
- Twitter: @kateparsonstv
- Other: http://float.land
Image Credit:
1) Photo courtesy of Katie Stenberg for Coaxial Arts Foundation
2) Image courtesy of Babak Motamen for FEMMEBIT
3) Image courtesy of Babak Motamen for FEMMEBIT
4) VR still, Dark Spring, courtesy of FLOAT
5) Image courtesy of Standard Vision
6) Image courtesy of Babak Motamen for FEMMEBIT
7) VR still, Liminal Realities, courtesy of FLOAT
8) Image courtesy of Babak Motamen for FEMMEBIT
9) Video Still, Valhalla, courtesy of Kate Parsons
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