by Emma Riva
This is a different kind of review I’m calling a “highlight,” a bite-sized recap of something I saw and liked. This week, I got the opportunity to view Juliet Phillips’ GET OUT FROM UNDER THE ROCK at Pullproof Studio (5112 Penn Ave) before its closing on September 22. Phillips and I are both native New Yorkers and bonded over both loving and losing New Golden Fried Dumplings, a now closed greasy hole-in-the-wall where you could buy a platter of dumplings for three bucks. It’s fitting that she and I connected over the shared memory of a commercial space, because much of Phillips’ work draws from how advertising and popular culture make up our consciousnesses. I first saw her whimsical use of color, which reminds me of the films of Wong-kar Wai or the photography of Petra Collins, at Bottom Feeder Books in Point Breeze. It’s sweet and nostalgic, playful and a little bit foreboding.
GET OUT FROM UNDER THE ROCK is a collection of drawings on a combination of notecards, printed ceramic, and even homemade paper, pasted together across the walls of Pullproof. On some of the homemade paper scraps, she’s taken what she calls “envelope innards” made of undulating lines and used them to accent the small, surreal scenes in ink and watercolor.
In the booklet that makes up her artist statement, Phillips wrote:
Some of you may be thinking, “Why not toss these scraps + bobs? They served their purpose.” But I don’t want to trash these things—they are evidence of life! And if they disappear, I might too. Well, in any case, here they are now all together—bumping/fighting/playing/nestling/hugging/whispering with each other.
In these words, Phillips personifies the drawings and their interactions. One of the things I love about her artwork is that she has a narrative voice. Just as novelists craft atmospheric scenes with words, artists, too, can create their own consistent atmospheres across their work. Phillips nails hers. Her work has a character in the soft pinks, obsidian-black ink linework, and simple, expressive face. Thinking about Phillips’ style, it should be in an art terminology textbook next to the word “expressive.” The expressionism/impressionism vocabulary is one that gets very murky very quickly, and the world Phillips builds in her drawings and paintings captures the expression of not just faces and bodies, but of objects themselves. Painted by her brush, a traffic cone blushes. An ink drawing of a Pepsi machine smiles.
Seeing the drawings all together at Pullproof feels almost like a storyboard, or a strung-together conspiracy theory map á la “Pepe Silvia” in Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But so much of artmaking, whether it’s songs, novels, or paintings, is an attempt to assemble together otherwise nonsensical things into something that makes some kind of sense. In Phillips’ drawings, I see a New Yorker trying to make sense of Pittsburgh, just as I have. It’s maybe a trite conclusion to say that all art is just people trying to make sense of things. But it’s such a basic sentiment because it’s so true. Rather than treating it as some big existential truth to be depressed about, it’s a lot more fun and a lot more honest to laugh about it.
The most recognizable image in Phillips’ sensemaking narrative is the lanternfly, at the first corner of the room, decorated with a question: SEE IT?
The spotted lanternfly is the perfect image for the absurd macabre of modern life. Is it a harbinger of doom? A nuisance? Should you kill it? Should you let it live? What does it say about you if you do/don’t? But Phillips’ lanternfly is beautiful, colorful. The title of the show, GET OUT FROM UNDER THE ROCK is a command to look around and take stock of the ordinary. Phillips knows, however, that what you see is ultimate out of her control, and that’s what makes her narrative voice so strong and rich.
Juliet Phillips’ GET OUT FROM UNDER THE ROCK closes 9/22—so still time to go tomorrow!
PETRICHOR 