Anton Parsons

Myopia, 2017

weatherproof steel and aluminium 4,700 x 170 x 170 mm

Myopia explores the idea of the spatial implications of the immediate and the remote.  It articulates the familiar and the unfamiliar, both intimate and distant.  At eye-level Myopia is engaging and accessible, there is an invitation to approach, enabling close inspection and acquaintance.

Stretching into the sky, Myopia, at its highest point is unattainable, impossible to get close to.  This duality of distance, the near and the far, states we are either here or elsewhere and expresses a desire to avoid the middle at all cost.

– Anton Parsons

Anton Parsons

born 1968, Palmerton North, Lives and works in Auckland

Anton Parsons works with a broad range of media encompassing industrial materials, ready made objects, photography and installation. Concepts are realised with seemingly insignificant ephemera which when redefined, reconstructed and represented can often accrue new meaning. In essence ‘sculpted’ materials become signifiers or clues to his continually evolving conceptual position.

The emptiness at the centre of many of Parsons’ sculptures is comparable to the breaks between tracks of music, the silences when the brain’s response to music is triggered rather than by the sounds themselves. Parson’s practice is a visual pause for thought, a pause not to be viewed as nothing happening, as it is the pause itself which becomes the event. His practice is validation that for there to be nothing there must be something and nothing is infinite.

Anton Parsons has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury. His work is in numerous public art gallery and private collections. He has commissioned work in public and private spaces in New Zealand, including the High Court in Wellington. Represented by Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch, and Suite, Wellington.