i’ve always had a very trying relationship with technology and its tangled web which has made so much possible that i’ve become terribly dependent on it. in all honesty without it i am a virtual cripple. so why not jump with joy at each new invention that makes my life so much better? not that i’d like to live in simpler times or would like to look a gift horse in the mouth, but my main gripe is with the fact that i’m now vigilantly praying at this altar of indispensibility and sense my children’s sensibilities are turning likewise.
i’m certainly aware that progress can sometimes be a wolf in sheep’s clothing and nobody portrays this disparate relationship between technology, nature and humanity better than robert and shana parkeharrison.
between their bleak smokey landscapes populated with mechanized characters from a fictional past tense, and vivid allusions to human-plant hybrids, they poke holes in the technological break though theories and present a metaphoric view of how these elements could alternatively connect and collide. the work becomes more than mere commentary on the disillusionment that humanity has suffered at the hands of science and technology, it also proposes different realities and fantastical scenes of nature, man and machine working together. adding an even stronger impact with their descriptive titles, they introduce a thought provoking narrative that suggests a much needed reflection to co-existence and although their visual manipulations have often been labeled as surreal, i prefer to look beyond the compositional to the underlying idealistic impossibilism.