-Alice Pelot
Brad Phillips’ painting Memoir Study (Mottled Green) (2011), hung above the front desk at Toronto’s Division Gallery, is the cover of a would-be Penguin-published book titled “Personal Work”, a nod to the highly edited fictions that comprise his autobiographical body of works. In the gallery’s front space are Phillips’ hyper-realistic oil paintings of unusual floral arrangements, witty word play, and intimate scenes of his partner Cristine Brache. Brache appears in his works in an obscurely sexually romantic, and yet not out-rightly erotic, way. The paintings capture their personal relationship and Brache’s consent in Phillips’ practice as implicated through titles like Mess Made by Request 2 (2016) in which Brache has peed her jeans. The exclusion of her face and inclusion of known fetishized props such as shoes allows Phillips’ admitted perverted ventures to be confessional while also contributing to a mysterious persona onto which we might also project our own vulnerability or shame.
Another, more prosaic body of work hung in the second gallery space follows in the line of artists Ed Ruscha and Wayne White, who painted inside jokes such as “Artists who make ‘pieces’”, and “Failed Abstract Paintings from the Seventies”, but instead of designing these artworks for the art world, Phillips writes for an audience who is familiar with nuanced online sarcasm. His one-liners are clever “Mariah Carey Me Home” (2015), occasionally self-deprecating “I am a drug addict” (2015) or self-referential “A joke is always an assertion of superiority” (2016). The undercutting nature of these jokes allows Phillips to defer his seriousness about being funny, leaving the reader who is in on the joke to laugh alone with the stylized semiotics. The slow motion meme of two boxers titled Birth was a Diagnosis (2015) seems culled directly from online feeds, and Phillips’ original paintings demand to be posted online through their undeniable ‘likeability’ and graphic quality. Phillips benefits from Instagramming fiends, and those social media proponents benefit from new, entertaining content, producing art for an audience capable of mass circulation. In this case, the photographic/genic quality of his digestibly aesthetic works also benefits from institutional representation as a pilgrimage destination that provides original content in a context built for the consumption of original images.
Just as Phillips is able to obscure his constructed narrative by painting from seemingly candid photographs or making pretentious statements, he also communicates his desire for personal mythology through Division Gallery’s press release. With the exception of his CV, the press release only contains tidbits from the life and work of Howard Hughes whose reclusive life and death was steeped in Hollywood myth. Without a directly reflective press release, the work successfully takes on a narrative beyond his art practice built upon the whim of each attendee’s projections. If it is narrative and personality you seek, then indulge this painterly writer and read his short story, The Dumb Tide, framed and hung alongside the other pages of his ‘autobiography’.
Just as Phillips is able to obscure his constructed narrative by painting from seemingly candid photographs or making pretentious statements, he also communicates his desire for personal mythology through Division Gallery’s press release. With the exception of his CV, the press release only contains tidbits from the life and work of Howard Hughes whose reclusive life and death was steeped in Hollywood myth. Without a directly reflective press release, the work successfully takes on a narrative beyond his art practice built upon the whim of each attendee’s projections. If it is narrative and personality you seek, then indulge this painterly writer and read his short story, The Dumb Tide, framed and hung alongside the other pages of his ‘autobiography’.