When a subject arrives in my inbox reading, “I’M JUST HAPPY WE GOT A CAT,” there’s a great chance I’m hooked.  I assume this conversational phrase has been spoken in many  homes across the world this year;  but it's also just a bit of insight into domesticity when all that is left to explore in your daily life is… domesticity.

Dutch artist Parra is one of the rare talents who traverse fashion, design, sculpture and fine art with a signature style that doesn’t compromise for the medium. Always an intuitive humorist, he perceives Life as good, but not without hypotheticals or analysis. The mundane holds much to be appreciated. In his 2016 cover story he offered a personal observation I’ve never forgotten, that ,“Basically, I just feel guilty all year round. I told my girlfriend the other day that I’ve been pretty much living a nonstop weekend for the last ten years.” And here is where you have his creative practice.

I’M JUST HAPPY WE GOT A CAT is a solo show, yes, a virtual one, but a self-produced solo show in a time when virtual and physical have a tendency to blur into one anyway. Originally planned for the US this year, Parra has really honed in on that “domestic” scenery into a lush and almost laid back existence. Female characters lounge,peer out with aplomb through windows, but trapped in their towers of monotony. In what was once highly pop-oriented work  has evolved in day-in-day out life that becomes  more abstracted when regarded closely. Parra doesn’t just let the scenes be still; he almost paints the corners of his mind onto the female character and allows the cracks and stream of consciousness to filter into the works, surrounding the compositions in a dreamy hue.

Parra has always seemed to exist on his own plane, a piece of his own universe that once predominantly had eyes and ears attuned  to skate and music culture. Now it’s more internal in his willingness to experiment,  grow and talk about those moments in-between the magic. His soul of improvisation is deep, and these works are more than just pandemic thoughts. —Evan Pricco