Portland Tribune

Portland, Oregon
October 25, 2005

Eight days into her monthlong installation/performance in the Portland Building, Parry begins to fill the 8-foot-by-10-foot public art space with crocheted plastic squares for an afghan — a security blanket without warmth, a metaphor for unfulfilling work.

Cold comfort
Artist deploys a homey craft to make a sharp point about work

By JOSEPH GALLIVAN     Issue date: Tue, Oct 25, 2005
The Tribune

   Through October, the artist is crocheting in the lobby of the Portland Building, where city and county employees work, in a space dedicated to public art. In this 8-foot-by-10-foot cubbyhole, many have come and gone since 1994, but no artist has ever installed herself with her work and made what she does a performance. (Christy Nyboer was there in March 2004 and put a wall between herself and the public, onto which they could pin questions, which she would retrieve through a little hole and answer in writing.)

   Parry crochets from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Instead of traditional yarn, she uses Terphane, a clear plastic rather like the stuff that comes around flower bouquets. She unspools it from a 10-mile-long roll, twisting it into a crude yarn.

   Her crochet hook is comically large. With it she creates one-meter-square afghan squares — about one every four hours. She needs 64 of them to cover the floor and two walls.

   “The Office Assistant” is the name of her temporary installation/performance, which runs though Nov. 4. A text on the wall explains that when Parry worked in offices, she took comfort in having an office assistant around. She now hopes to turn people’s attention to the role of security in their own jobs.

   Like the typical cheerful Australian, she’s unpretentious in her manner and alert to humor. That would make her something of an outsider in the Portland art world, with its dour, starving-artist earnestness, if she wasn’t already an outsider by choice. Although she has a studio here, in Hillsdale, she divides the rest of her time between the Czech Republic and South Korea.

   Parry makes sculptures from thousands of small pieces of fired clay, held together with wire. Her hero is the American artist Ann Hamilton, one of whose installations was 750,000 pennies stuck in honey.

   Parry went to scope out the lobby a week before she began.

   “None of the people I saw looked happy,” she says. “They have something others (such as artists) don’t, which is job security.”

   Her idea, hatched a year before, was to create a security blanket that has no warmth, as a metaphor for the unfulfilling job.
   On her second day, she sits at her chair, with one other chair for visitors.

   A young bicycle messenger stands and watches, looking like he’s on the verge of commenting.

   “Do you understand the metaphor?” Parry asks, without introduction.

   “Uh, no.”

   She launches in. “It’s about how the security blanket of work doesn’t provide any real warmth.”

   This is useful: art that comes with an instant interpretation. The two of them get into a quick back-and-forth about why the messenger doesn’t become an artist (he has no savings), and that’s that.

   “I think after a while, when I get into the work, I’ll find it hard to give people this much attention,” Parry says.
   
   On the move
   Parry’s commute is a four-mile walk. This is nothing compared to the pilgrimage walks she has done, in Ireland, Poland (with druids!), Malaysia and Bali, and on the island of Shikoku, Japan.

   “I’ve walked 25 miles a day for six weeks before,” she says with a grin. She does this to study the religions involved, and to understand the placement of objects in the landscape. All of which ties in with her degree in mapmaking from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

   She comes from the bush, as she calls it, in Victoria, Australia, which she left “too bloody long ago.” Work took her all over the world. Her last job was as chief executive of an U.S.company’s subsidiary in India, which she won’t name. Basically, she set up and managed call centers.

   “I always got into trouble because I’d do things like clean up the conference room after using it,” she says. “It would make other managers nervous, and they’d say I was wasting my time. But I believe if you have people working for you, you should know what they do.”

   In 2002 she chucked it all in. “I went from six figures a year to $6 an hour,” she says, referring to her current part-time job washing dishes at her regular eatery, downtown’s Sushi Takahashi. She admits she misses the quality of conversations she had in the corporate world, about strategy, production, data analysis and even foreign policy.

   “Artists here tend to be cynical, or completely removed,” she says.
   
   There’s plenty of talk
   Time in her studio Parry calls “pure project management.” She devotes at least four hours a day to sculpture, even if it means getting up at 4 a.m.

   “You can’t do repetitive work like this in a bad mood,” she says.

   The big question she asks at the Portland Building is: “Are you doing what you truly want to be doing today?” And if not, why not?

   After 10 days a routine has established itself. People are constantly waving or stopping to see how the quilt is progressing.

   “And it’s got so there’s so much socializing it’s hard to get away at the end of the day,” Parry says.

   She’s still enjoying the interactions — and keeping tabs.

   “Out of 87 people I’ve talked to, two absolutely love their jobs. Two hate theirs. About 60 are comfortable but wish they could be doing something else. And the rest are comfortable but don’t know what else to do. That’s the scary thing to me — the people who don’t know.”

   That, of course, and the person who said she was staying for the benefits.

   “Lots of people are here for the benefits, but one said, ‘I’m just waiting 15 years until I retire.’ I thought, ‘You must be a fun person to come home to!’ ”

   “The Office Assistant” is an interesting piece of art for two reasons. One, its meaning is discrete, rather than open-ended. There is only so much to “get.” And two, it provokes discussion, not about art, but about life.

   Good job!
   
   Watching the watchers
   After 10 days, Zen Parry has made some observations based on “The Office Assistant” (she’s blogging her experience, of course: at www.ovoo.com/blog.html).

   • Lots of people tell Parry they were taught to crochet as a child.

   • Many people from offices and the bus mall outside drop by the space once a month just to check out the art.

   • The ATM is the lobby’s true people magnet.

   • The colorful security guard known as Dave has an environment that parallels Parry’s, where people drop by for chats.

   • The only negative comments about her work have been written in the book when Parry’s not around. One woman said she should be making blankets for hurricane victims and accused her of not using recycled plastic. (Parry calls the material she’s using “salvaged.”)

   • Another comment reads: “This just goes to show that some ‘art’ is truly meaningless. But I guess that’s OK too.”
   
    Email Joseph Gallivan

‘The Office Assistant’ When: 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday, through Nov. 4 Where: Lobby of the Portland Building, 1120 S.W. Fifth Ave. Cost: Free, 503-823-5111 or racc.org