Mary Parisi was born and raised in San Francisco and currently lives nearby in the town of Pacifica.

This May, Parisi's photographs will be shown at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester MA from May 13 - June 20. This past winter Parisi's work was shown at the Lishui Photography Festival in China.

In 2009 Parisi's work was included in the exhibition 10 X 10 X 10 which was sponsored by Photo Alliance and the San Francisco Art Commission. The exhibition was critically acclaimed by San Francisco critic, Kenneth Baker who reviewed the exhibition in the San Francisco Chronicle and who also named it one of the ten best exhibitions held in San Francisco during 2009.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-09-05/entertainment/17205170_1_san-francisco-city-hall-linda-connor-images

Parisi has exhibited throughout the US and in Germany and China. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Museum of Photography in Lishui, China.

Meg Shifflers’s statement about Parisi's work in 10 X 10 X 10 follow
Director, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery

Curator’s Statement

In 2007, I was invited to provide feedback to artists at Photo Alliance’s National Juried Portfolio Review, an annual event in San Francisco that attracts emerging photographers from across the country. At this event, I met Mary Parisi. She is not flashy, not a kid, not cocky and certainly does not bow to trends. Parisi is a quietly confident, incredibly focused artist with technical skills and a specific vision that mostly revolves around her life and domestic settings she is intimately familiar with. Her work stood out in a sea of portfolios, and I have been looking for an opportunity to champion her for the past two years.

The exhibited images of fruit, specifically prunes and blackberry residue, are mysterious and graceful studies of both dark masses suspended in thick indecipherable liquid as well as minute bits stuck on a moist white surface. The subjects are abstracted into oblivion and what emerges is quite alien and elegant. The images of plucked chickens in various stages of preparation and cooking are more grotesque than mysterious. It is the pale puckered flesh barely concealing meat and bones, that open cavity, that, recognizable body, sans head and feet: all floating in milky or clear liquid. Any visual familiarity with the chickens is trumped by more visceral responses ranging from repulsion to morbid curiosity. It is true that with much of Parisi’s work that the grotesque and the beautiful walk hand in hand.

For me, it’s all about her photographs of large cuts of meat wrapped in plastic. These are the photographs that remained in my mind long after briefly viewing Parisi’s portfolio. There is nothing grotesque present in this body of work, quite the opposite. The images exude glamour and dare I say, sexiness, which defies what the objects photographed actually are. The way Parisi has prepared her subjects, and the way she has shot them, has more to do with fashion photography than with classic still life or landscape work. The subject is wrapped in something that transforms it completely. Large beads of sweat caught under the surface become shiny jewels that reflect light and drip in strands, while tiny sweat bubbles conjoin to form a lacy veil. Like the painter Marilyn Minter, Parisi closes in tightly on her subjects, and instead of resting on the banal, she highlights the extraordinary, other worldliness of something as basely mundane as meat. Wrapped in pattern, with light accentuating curves and twinkling surfaces against red moist flesh – this meat looks like it’s ready to go to theDisco. It’s naughty, really.