2025 marks the 10th anniversary of Parker Ito’s exhibition A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night at Chateau 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) (2013-2015), is now in the Public Art Collection at Wesleyan University. For this anniversary re-presentation, the artist will build a fresh installation around the painting, resituating it among some of the original installation elements and new ones, all in new configurations. The original exhibition included numerous sculptures, bronzes and ceramics, that riffed off the ubiquitous figurative iconography of a local Los Angeles company Western Exterminator.

Ito first anonymously exhibited these paintings in an Atwater, California café in 2014. Following the show, all the paintings returned to the artist’s studio where a second painting was added to the reverse side of each. The next chapter of these works was an exhibition at Smart Objects, Los Angeles in 2014, followed by an exhibition at White Cube, London later that year. Each iteration of these works resulted in very different, and maximal, installations. Ito likes to play with the conventions of exhibition-making including alternative installation strategies but also the extensions of the exhibition, including the artist’s bio or the press release. Ito opened a text published in Artforum in 2015, “I want to make exhibitions where there is always a potential for the work to be shifting.” He goes on to explain that the question was how to make something that felt like the artist’s website, where he’s always making new work and always editing. The artist’s website became like his masterwork containing everything the artist has ever done and everything is located within a bigger structure.

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. If we think about it in those terms, then every single artist ever in the history of art is a Post-Internet artist. The Post-Internet era changed the way that we perceived and understood art. Now you can look at cave paintings magnified by a thousand times their original size online. That is more about a historical condition which we are living through and looking at art through.”

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