Near Miss
Parker Conrad
December 5th- January 11th, 2025


Perhaps, one of the strongest connections people have with an inanimate object is with the car. In the practical sense, cars are machines designed to transport. The car’s purpose grants a sense of freedom, control, and adventure, creating a shared “good” association in the embodied habitus. Although, it is bound to break down. In Near Miss, Conrad examines where the bond between humans and cars merge, how the machine becomes the body and the body assimilates to the machine. The two dissolve into each other, an auto-body of sorts.

Humans and cars, put simply, are made of parts. Wires to veins and flesh to panels, all are necessary for optimal functionality. The potential of parts reworked are limitless. In dead even of static from one end of the band to the other, tire tracks collaged into aluminum extend through the gallery walls; its seamlessness inferring the motion of a car driving along a path. But in the exhibition, its fluidity comes as a surprise. The tracks push past the wall’s boundary and continue on. A road destined to continue.

Paths emerge from choices influenced by the embodied habitus. While individual, those paths exist in preconceived outcomes. But the parts that create those outcomes are found in transformation and discovery. Without repair there is no examination, and if things never broke there would be no need to figure out a new way to perform, to push past the next wall. Eventually, a wire becomes loose, a bone gets broken, and malfunctions begin to pile up. Because no one can sustain without eventually breaking down, all we can hope for is to repair, mend, and modify the parts of us that form our paths.

Parker Conrad (b. 1991 Mooresville, NC) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from NYU Steinhardt with an MA in 2021. He works as a tattoo artist in conjunction with their painting practice. His work explores biomorphic abstraction and speculative fiction. Conrad's work has been shown at NYU's 80WSE (NY) as well as the artist-run spaces MotherCulture in Los Angeles and Iowa Projects in Crown Heights.