Parker Leabo
parkerleabo.comI’m a multidisciplinary designer and artist born, raised, and based in the Bay Area. My design work investigates the deconstruction of visual languages while maintaining communicability, thorough typographic exploration, and a rigorous experimentation process. I often find myself immersed in the study of folk art, tattoo traditions, and counter culture aesthetics. I enjoy educating myself, discovering, and referencing design communities and cultures that are otherwise overlooked. For me, the most compelling work emerges from the study of trade and craft traditions that are shaped by diverse cultural perspectives. I believe thatan interplay of analogue materials and digital editing can create work that enacts more emotionality and depth than a purely digital approach. In every part of my work, I seek to make thorough, intentional decisions that can solve complex problems.
Forms of the Formless
Forms of the Formless is an investigation of the human tendency to tell mythical stories. Myths are a peculiar aspect of the human experience, and exist as a vehicle for us to simultaneously externalize and internalize cultural values. I rebuke the notion that myths and stories are folly. Rather, I suggest that myths are living, real, non-physical entities we exist in a symbiotic relationship with. These are living structures that we use to share our likeness with, and hold important ancestral and cultural memories. Much like a myth, shadows are a non-physical entity that exist because of a relationship between objects. To enact this parallel, I used illustrations of stencils that project myths through an interplay of light and shadow. Aesthetically, inspired by overlooked occult and abstruse books, I sought to recreate the visual language of esoteric texts in a modern design object. It was my goal to not only depict these stories, but enact them conceptually.