Tim Parsley is the Program Director and Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Saint Francis, School of Creative Arts in Fort Wayne, IN. Tim earned his BA from the University of Cincinnati and his MA from Miami University (Oxford, OH). As an artist primarily working through painting, drawing, and collage, Parsley’s work navigates the history of America and the complicated tensions caused by its constructive ambition.
My work navigates American history and the complicated effect of its constructive ambition. With a focus on the originating stories of America, I appropriate and piece together scraps of historic imagery and collective memory, reconstructing the American narrative of progress to reveal and reinterpret a nostalgic anxiety about the past. The construction of America was a dichotomous and implicating mixture of hope, pride, destruction, and dominance culminating in a conflicted national history. We live in the wake of this complicated history and continue to play out the same drama in our individual lives. My paintings, collages, and drawings explore the undercurrent assumptions that cultivate this phenomenon.
