ROOTS: Pat Phillips
For more of Pat Phillips’s work, please visit the artist’s website: http://patphillipsart.com/
Pat Phillips’s ROOTS Exhibition at Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, January 11th, 2014 – February 2nd, 2014
Opening Reception: 6:00pm-9:00pm, Saturday, January 11th
With Artist Talk and Walk-through from 5:00pm-6:00pm
Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, 3718 Saint Claude Ave, New Orleans
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 12 P.M. to 5 P.M. (if you are visiting on a weekday please call ahead to insure someone is available to greet you)
ROOTS, a solo exhibition by Pat Phillips, examines issues of social hierarchy, race, and consumerism, and their entanglement with black southern heritage and the artist’s own personal history. From his youthful years painting graffiti to dropping out of college to pursue a career in art, Pat Phillips began to notice a transition within himself between “graffiti writer” and “gallery artist.” While embracing this experience, he began to question our society’s allure with graffiti, reflecting on the incongruity that, like slavery and civil rights, people cringe at the idea, but can’t wait to fill their homes with cute Mammy motifs and art created by vandals. In the series on display, Pat Phillips takes a crude approach to his graffiti aesthetic. Much in the vein of the folk art tradition, he embraces his earlier, seemingly uneducated, use of mediums, while exploring correlation culture and subculture.
About Pat Phillips:
Pat Phillips is a southern artist currently residing in Lafayette, LA. Moving to a small town in Louisiana in 1995, Pat Phillips spent most of his childhood doodling cartoon characters and “hanging out” in train yards. After attending Memphis College of Art in Memphis Tennessee for two years, Phillips moved back to Louisiana and began focusing on work centering on his youth and southern upbringing. His work has been features in such galleries Baton Gallery’s “Surreal Salon,” Acadiana Center of Art’s “1000 Words,” and more recently, Punch Gallery’s “Whither the American Dream,” in Seattle, WA. Among some of his solo exhibits and collaborative projects are: Northwestern University’s “Memphis Retrospective” and Acadiana Center of Art’s “Uncle Tom’s Watermelon Rebellion of 89,” which was featured in Transition magazine.
