Chris Domenick / Parker Ito

Currently on view until March 2, 2025, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at the Center for the Arts presents two concurrent solo exhibitions: Chris Domenick’s Private Figure and Parker Ito’s A Lil’ Taste of A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night. 

Chris Domenick: Private Figure
Chris Domenick’s Private Figure, his solo exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, is the extension of his studio practice based out of a former Subway restaurant in Canaan, Connecticut. Private Figure is composed of framed wall-based works and floor- and ceiling-based lamps. Within Domenick’s practice the frame acts as a “suspender” and not a “finisher.” The contents of the frames—drawings, print works, fragments of paper, or found imagery—are often placed inside rather than affixed. Through these combinations of image and object, Domenick sees the works “fulfilling their identity as framed drawings” but also through “some kind of slippage” existing as sculptures. This collapsing of categories also complicates the relationship between the different types of work in the gallery. Domenick’s lamps, filled with the viewer’s expectations of use, are instrumental in lighting the space and the framed artworks around them. “While this ontological companionship could be framed as the lamp lights the artwork,” the artist explains, “it may be more apt to say that the artwork enables a clearer viewing of the lamp.”

Profile
Chris Domenick is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, drawing, and writing. His work explores the poetics of materiality and craft, often engaged with vernacular forms of architecture, design, and the decorative arts. He utilizes abstraction as a means to examine the semantics of surface, shape, and touch. Domenick received an MFA from Hunter College and has received awards from various institutions including the Shandaken Project, the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Recess Activities. Recent projects include Detour: cul de sac at International Waters, Song-shaped Sill at the Al Held Foundation, Flat Moon at Kate Werble Gallery, 5 O D A Y S at MASS MoCA, and Particulate Paper Records of Time in Cabinet Magazine. He has been included in exhibitions at Canada Gallery, the Queens Museum, The Vanity East, MoMA, Essex Flowers, Regina Rex, and Room East, among others.

Parker Ito: A Lil’ Taste of A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night
2025 marks the 10th anniversary of Parker Ito’s exhibition A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night at Château Shatto, Los Angeles. This maximal and constantly-changing months-long exhibition included a series of eight double-sided paintings, each paired with a set of custom powder-coated chainlink. One of those paintings, People tell me everyday that I’m really creative (peace on earth) (A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night Installation) (2013–15), is now in the Public Art Collection at Wesleyan University. For this anniversary re-presentation, the artist built a fresh installation around the painting, resituating it among some of the original installation elements and new ones, all in new configurations. Ito’s work is associated with the term “Post-Internet.” Often used to narrowly categorize a specific aesthetic derived from the internet or an overload of information, Ito prefers to define it much more broadly, “Post-Internet as a state or period that we are living in that is applied to everything, not just art, but to the world.”

Profile
Parker Ito (b. 1986) is a contemporary artist. He is a fourth generation Japanese American, or Yonsei, living and working in Los Angeles.

Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee with Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox. Installation by Art Preparator Paul Theriault.

Support for these exhibitions and related programming was provided by the College of Design and Engineering Studies, Studio Art Program, and the Fries Center for Global Studies at Wesleyan Unversity, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.

Zilkha Gallery is free and open to the public Tuesday through Sunday. Located on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut, it is situated two hours north of New York.