ArtGrams: Acts of Silence

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Experiment Station

Helen Frederick’s “Primordial Forest Shadows” (2015) captured by Instagrammer @mycelium_rhizoid

This month’s ArtGrams focuses on visitor photos of Helen Frederick’s Intersections installation Acts of Silence. The exhibition responds to works by Morris Graves from the Phillips’s permanent collection and addresses the endangerment and degradation of the environment.

From Instagrammer @iambanafsheh: “Making my own art with the art pieces & my muse, @mharnal.” Reflection off of Morris Graves’s “Weather Prediction Instruments for Meteorologists,” installed in Acts of Silence

Instagrammer @miadesi took this picture of Frederick’s “Trees Darker Than the Night” (2015) at February’s Phillips after 5

@itsartprofessorjess focused on Frederick’s four pulp paintings, “Phenomenal Space” (2015)

Profile of @daenerjess_targaryen in Frederick’s “Acts of Silence” video and sound installation, for which the exhibition is named

Installation view of the Acts of Silence exhibition captured by @gypsielaydee

Frederick’s “Primordial Forest Shadows” from below by @neagley

Detail of Frederick’s “Trees Darker Than the Night” by @clairesgould

From @sarahrose_t, who snapped this photo at February’s Phillips after 5: “Being artsy. #datenight #freewine #haze”

This shot of Frederick’s “Phenomenal Space” by @dnl340 captures the dark ambience of the galleries

Spotlight on Intersections@5: Linn Meyers

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Experiment Station

The Phillips celebrates the fifth anniversary of its Intersections contemporary art series with Intersections@5, an exhibition comprising work by 20 of the participating artists. In this blog series, each artist writes about his or her work on view.

Linn Meyers, Untitled, 2014. Gift of Lucinda and Carlos Garcia

The unmediated directness of making a drawing is the result of a line being an extension of the hand and the body. The line is universal.

At the Time Being was a site-specific wall drawing made in response to Van Gogh’s The Road Menders. I chose Van Gogh’s work as a starting point because the method that the artist used to apply paint to his canvases shares some of the same qualities of a drawing.

Twenty-five years ago, I began my career as a painter. Over time I became enamored with the distilled qualities of drawing, and eventually drawing became my primary focus.

While working on the Intersections project in 2010, however, I found that I was not only drawing on the wall, but also using a paintbrush to enhance the image. That return to painting as a mode of expression during the project at the Phillips has stuck with me, and Untitled, 2014 is evidence of that. The piece blends drawing and painting; it puts the two modes of expression on equal footing. The lines in Untitled, 2014 have a calligraphic quality that was achieved with a paintbrush; however, the act of making a line is, in and of itself, an act of drawing.

Linn Meyers

Spotlight on Intersections@5: Annabel Daou

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Experiment Station

Annabel Daou, pieces of the love letter: the common tongue, 2014. Gift of the Artist and Tanja Wagner Gallery, Berlin, 2015

In pieces of the love letter: the common tongue, fragmented sheets of paper are left unmarked by ink, but are held together by mending tape, which is alternately adhered to or suspended above the paper. The love letter is repetitive and frantic. It attempts to lay claim to something solid and precise and yet it seems always on the verge of disintegration.

The love letter figures in this work figures as a privileged marker of the impossible adequateness of language and desire. The ability to express a seemingly universal emotion is perpetually placed in question, both by the work and by the authors of the language they employ.

This work furthers Daou’s exploration of the intersections between writing, speech, and non-verbal modes of communication. As elsewhere in her work, language emerges as a site of both ruin and repair.