Parker Ito
The Pilgrim’s Living Room Crucifixion; Mona Lisa Hyper-Gamble
August, 2025
Parker Ito’s latest project, The Pilgrim’s Living Room Crucifixion; Mona Lisa Hyper-Gamble, comprises a group of digital works that together form a single, shape-shifting body, less a collection of individual images than a flickering stream of consciousness. Each piece is its own moment, yet all are entangled, stitched together by recurrent motifs, moods, and visual glitches. Ito appears to have found his ideal medium in the NFT, its capacity for maximalist expression, in form, scale and distribution, underlining the structure of the work, turning iteration and reuse into a distinct vocabulary.
The series continues a stylistic throughline recognisable to those familiar with Ito’s recent networked explorations, starting with last year’s ParkerIto.net and winding through projects like Horses?2 and Drilady on Solana via VVV. These experiments with generative pipelines like HashLips, and the traitmaxxed culture that embraces chaotic layering and noise over the usual PFP legibility, have evolved into a visual language that matches his fast, layered, and iterative way of thinking. Here that language is more specific, with the angular flatness associated with traitmaxxing giving way to a clarified stage where depth, lighting, and perspective hold the chaos in place.
For Ito, NFTs are the first medium to meet the internet on its own terms. Post-internet art taught us to account for the network, but it also tethered that insight to the white cube, where simulations of the online world often felt performative. Ito frames the NFT not simply as a depiction of internet culture but a unit of it, native to screens, moving at network tempo, and accruing meaning through circulation rather than institutional framing.
That digital-native footing also resolves a long-standing tension in Ito’s practice. For years, the work began as Photoshop collages and was then translated, often through assistants and fabrication systems, into large physical pieces, a relay that inevitably introduced drift between intention and outcome. With NFTs, Ito works in what he calls “the rawest form of expression”, the original blueprint is the artwork. The file that once served as a proxy now stands as the final object, preserving composition, timing, and surface effects with a fidelity that analogue translation can't sustain. The work remains inside the medium where it’s conceived, the closest, most accurate rendering of the initial impulse.
The series itself is perhaps the most personal of Ito’s onchain explorations, drawing heavily from the interior of his old Hollywood apartment, its living room and couch, but its references extend outward, folding in echoes of past paintings, daily detritus, and dreamlike symbols. Imagination, memory, and environment collapse into one porous visual system, guided less by logic than by instinct and digital toolkits.
Crafted through Photoshop and a suite of programs Ito has long treated as creative collaborators; the works fluctuate in tone and density. Some feel like whisper-thin sketches, others like chaotic frescoes, swarming with flowers, floating heads, furniture, and the ever-present rider on horseback, often missing its own. These images don’t settle; they morph, repeat, vanish. Across the thousand, objects come and go, as if surfacing and sinking within a single, elastic narrative. What emerges is less a gallery of pictures than a living archive, a mythic, digital landscape caught in the act of becoming.
Seen onchain, the living room becomes both chapel and console. Ito fuses art-historical gravity with the domestic and the memetic, then routes the result through a workflow that treats networked distribution as form. It is not a PFP collection, yet a PFP collection is embedded inside it. Horses, knights, and Drilady reappear as nested figures, like Russian dolls. NFTs sits inside NFTs, with identity and meaning being constructed and reinforced relationally. The piece behaves as a system rather than a single image, a small Gesamtkunstwerk for the blockchain that contains its own cast, its own lore, its own means of circulation.
Bio
Parker Ito is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles whose practice spans painting, sculpture, video, installation, printmaking, drawing, websites, NFTs, and books. His work is as much about the lines between disparate media and forms—in effect, the network itself—as it is about discrete pieces. Rooted in an early art-driven internet community, its elasticity reflects that of the web, and...