One and Only #3 :
Marsha Pels
To Fly, To Drive,

August, 2013

As we prepare to leave our original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we're happy to announce that as it will remain unoccupied into September, we have the opportunity to present an installation by Marsha Pels, to be viewed through the gallery window.

Shown for the first time early last year in a solo show at Schroeder Romero & Shredder in Chelsea, we're delighted to have the chance to host this intriguing and haunting piece that will certainly be striking as a window installation with its own rather eerie internal light source.

In a review of the exhibition mentioned above, in Sculpture magazine, the critic and curator, Karen Wilkin described the piece as a "spectacular...vision of twinned, air-borne, larger-than-life, winged dogs…cast in translucent resin and lit from within. These robust but ethereal canine-angels are chained to a 1997 Lincoln V8 engine. The glowing dogs seem to move upward, but whether they will succeed in raising the engine in an apotheosis or succumb to its weight remains in doubt." Wilkin goes on to explain that "Rich as [Pels'] imagery is and potent as the associations provoked by her choice of generating objects are, much of the resonance of her work is bound up with its physical, material presence".
This is the aspect that made us believe this would be an excellent piece, not only for this window presentation, but also for the third in our series: "One and Only". This program, intended to focus strong attention, and hopefully visibility on a single work, is going to play a central role in the new incarnation of Parker's Box, and we're delighted to be able to pursue it a little earlier than expected, with this piece by Marsha Pels.

Marsha Pels is internationally known for sculpture which includes a range of labor-intensive cast and fabricated objects, multi-media installations and outdoor site-specific pieces. Her work explores the transformation of found objects in a variety of materials. Pels defines spaces within site-specific contexts in order to create poetically charged psychological landscapes.

Pels has won numerous awards including a 1981 Public Art Fund Grant, a Prix de Rome in 1984, a Fullbright Senior Scholar award to Germany in 1997, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2004, and most recently; a 2013 Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant.