Ito Parker Biography
Parker Ito was born in 1986 in Long Beach, California. His father worked for an oil company, while his mother was a hairdresser who is now an x-ray technician. As a young man, Ito acted and sang on television, but initially had ambitions of becoming a professional skateboarder. He worked as an oil derrick painter in Los Angeles before becoming a professional artist.
Ito uses many pseudonyms, including Deke McLelland Two, Creamy Dreamy, and Parker Cheeto, to complicate the authorship of his works. His artistic practice aims to challenge authorship and authenticity in different forms. Ito has a unique character that he portrays in photographs and videos, where he can be seen wearing high-end designer clothes or skateboarding in his studio. His personal photographs are often manipulated to add additional graphic elements and deemed new works of art.
Ito hires paid assistants to produce works, insisting on paying them a fair wage and allowing the works produced to be made in the salaryman's style. This strategy was used in her project The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet, created while she was still attending the California College of the Arts in Oakland. In this project, Ito reproduced and manipulated a stock photo of a young girl wearing a backpack on a college campus into different styles and interpretations.
The use of assistants was also employed to produce the works exhibited at London's White Cube gallery for its 2014 exhibition, Part 2: Nora Berman, Blackwidow LA, Parker Cheeto, Carey Garris, Justin John Greene, Celia Hollander, Daniel Lane, Lee Marshall and Orion Martin: Maid in Heaven / En Plein Air in Hell (My Beautiful Dark and Twisted Cheeto Problem). All of his assistants received artist credit within the exhibition, creating the illusion that it was a group exhibition.
Ito is not interested in ownership of ideas or stylistic decisions in the age of information sharing, instead arguing that the spread of ideas is the primary purpose of his existence. The main concerns of his artistic practice are authorship and authenticity, technical reproduction, professionalization and corporatization of art, the effect of oppression and the role and influence of the Internet on contemporary culture.
