Corrie Francis Parks - Exhibitions

Corrie Francis Parks: Foreign Exchange

Solo Exhibition
January 12 - March 15, 2026
Richard B. Talkin Family Art Gallery
Howard Community College, Columbia, MD, USA

The currency we use on a daily basis contains a nation’s carefully curated stories, its values and history physically embedded in a mix of ink, fiber, paper, and plastic. These banal artifacts may pass through a thousand hands before ending up tucked in the back of a traveler's drawer, an archaic reminder of the individual’s experience of that nation.

Foreign Exchange explores the tenuous connections and reinventions that keep the global economic tides flowing through banknotes and sand from over 50 countries. Building upon her unique practice of micro-sand animation, in which the individual grains of sand take on a life of their own, Parks expands the work into the gallery with currency collages and artifacts from the film’s production.

The exhibition offers a web of connections, real and imaginary, between the masses of humanity and the systems we live in.

Exhibition Documentation

Foreign Exchange - solo exhibition Jan 12-Mar 15, 2026

Gallery view

Space Moths (2025, inkjet print, currency, sand)

Imperial Gaze (2025, currency and sand on handmade paper)

Economic Tides (2025, currency and sand on handmade paper)

The Headwaters (2021, currency and sand)

Political Bands (2017, animation set with currency, sand, and gold flakes)

Political Bands (detail)

Banknote catalog

Sand catalog

Eye of Providence, (2025, currency, sand, glass, handmade paper)

Eye of Providence, (detail)

Sand Dollar (2021, currency and sand)

Imagined Fraternity (2021, currency collage on handmade paper)

Gallery view

Corrie Francis Parks: Uncanny Bodies

Solo Exhibition
March 5 - March 29, 2026
George W. Carver Center for Arts and Technology
Towson, MD, USA

I have worked with sand long enough to have discovered the significance of an individual grain. On a microscopic scale, the movement of one small grain can ripple down the length of a beach. When I inspect these seemingly trivial fragments of geological history, I find their inner autonomy. By shrinking time through stop motion animation, I discover complex relationships within their small communities, which the human eye is too impatient to see. Carefully constructing an intimate environment for them, I coax them to reveal their gravity and impulse. This is the science-magic of the animator, to discover the invisible life in the overlooked, offering the possibility of significance to the diminutive.

Uncanny Bodies draws on the artistry of scientific documentarians like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke and F. Percy Smith, who revealed the wonders of microscopic structures and beings through the technology of their times. Tapping into the revelations of unseen worlds outside human scale, this body of work is meant to spark curiosity and questions about our own anthropomorphic viewpoint.

Like the early explorers into micrographia, we can no longer see the world in quite the same way, having, if only for a few moments, condensed ourselves to the size of a grain of sand.

Exhibition Documentation