Recent drawings by Mike Park Curated by New York artist Tim Evans. The exhibit will also feature the animated video work of Tim Evans with Jason Smith.

The often whimsical and densely meandering narrative work of Mike Park is driven by his experiences living and working in the remote industrial sprawl of east Oakland, California. Anti-heroic, metonymically charged, and often sexually ambiguous, Park’s polymer coated acrylic paintings on wood are a pointed yet playful counter-attack on socially prescribed notions of narrative and sexual inhibition. In a world populated by antlered pubescent hybrids doing battle on ornate Persian rugs, boys kissing boys kissing girls, buttery rainbows and crumpled drunks pissing themselves, Park’s tableaus unfold like candy-colored hallucinations. At times dark and menacing, but always oddly uplifting, the power of Park’s work lies in its ability to oscillate between the industrial warble of his immediate surroundings and the inner reaches his imagination where desire, loss and self-deprecation meld into an orgiastic mélange of androgynous allure.

Press release by Tim Evans