Steve Parker | Day is Done

Exhibition Dates: Jan 23 – Feb 23,2023

Gallery Hours: Work activated at sunset each day, (5-5:30pm)

ICOSA Collective is proud to present its inaugural Soundscapes activation, Day is Done, a sound work by Steve Parker utilizing salvaged brass bells, musical score fragments, and recorded voices on 6 channel audio.

“Every sunset for five years, U.S. Marine veteran Guy Taylor Sr. stood on his balcony overlooking a downtown Galveston intersection, put a bugle to his lips and played taps to honor friends who died in a struggle for an obscure hill in the Taebaek Mountains in what is now South Korea.” (Houston Chronicle) Over time, Taylor’s solitary performance grew into a cherished local ritual, bringing together residents, tourists, and even attracting national press. Taylor died in 2017. ('A True American Hero,' TIME Magazine, Feb 2017)

Steve Parker is an artist, musician, and curator. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Ashurst Prize (UK), the Tito’s Prize, a Fulbright, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Parker works with salvaged musical instruments, amateur choirs, marching bands, urban bat colonies, flocks of grackles, and pedicab fleets to investigate systems of control, interspecies behavior, and forgotten histories. His projects include elaborate civic rituals for humans, animals, and machines; listening sculptures modeled after obsolete surveillance tools; and cathartic transportation symphonies for operators of cars, pedicabs, and bicycles. Parker has exhibited and performed at institutions, public spaces, and festivals internationally. Highlights include the the American Academy in Rome (Italy), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), CUE Art Foundation (NY), the Fusebox Festival (Austin), Gwangju Media Art Festival (Korea), the Guggenheim Museum (NY), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY), Los Angeles Philharmonic inSIGHT (LA), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), Rich Mix (London), SXSW, and Tanglewood. As a soloist and as an artist of NYC-based "new music dream team" Ensemble Signal, he has premiered 200+ new works. Parker has been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, the Copland Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Mid America Arts Alliance. He is curator of SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum of Art, Executive Director of Collide Arts, and a faculty member at UTSA. He holds degrees in Math and Music from Oberlin, Rice, and UT Austin.