Shelley Parriot, American
Set to be displayed in George H.P. Smith Park at the end of May 2025.
 
​Shelley Parriott has degrees from The Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Boston University (MFA). Her work has been exhibited and collected in her native New York City, throughout the Hudson Valley (New York), the USA and Europe. She has received numerous honors and awards including: New York Meets Berlin, a three-artist invitational, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany (US Embassy, Berlin Travel Grant); and the Medici Prize, Lorenzo il Magnifico Sculpture Medallion, Biennale Internazionale dell’ Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy (International jury including Barbara Rose and John T. Spike). Her solo exhibition of multiple large-scale sculptural installations inaugurated the ‘Plein Air’ Gallery at The Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs, Florida, where radiant ‘Color Fields’ were inspired by the luminous Florida sky. Parriott was represented at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Italy. 
 
The site-specific installations are composed of individual units of perforated heavy-gauge industrial aluminum. They are structurally sound although they appear illusory. Viewers actually become participants as they can walk into and through the sculpture’s transparent overlapping layers. Moving through time and space they experience the installation from the inside looking out, or the outside looking in. They are connected to each other, to the art, to fields of color, and to nature as the environment is seen through the perforations.

Constantly changing patterns and optical illusions are discovered as sheer layers play in changing light. As light passes through the transparency of the sculpture, the atmosphere shifts; shapes that at first glance appear to be solid and corporeal now elude definition. Mysterious shimmering nuances seem to appear/disappear, and take on an airy quality not usually associated with structurally sound large-scale sculpture.