NYAB Event - Daniel Phillips "River Street"

Daniel Phillips "River Street"

DODGEgallery

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Dodge gallery presents "River Street", an exhibition of new video work by Daniel Phillips. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and his New York debut.

For nearly two years Phillips made an historic, abandoned elevator tower in a former paper mill his outdoor studio space. His practice, characterized by consistent documentation of site via still images captured from varying vantage points, produces video installations of these edited images projected onto the site's terrain. Phillips projects onto irregular surfaces, the flowing Neponset river behind the tower, hanging fabric in the windowless voids of buildings, and dripping sheets of winter ice, documenting his attempts to recreate a sense of life in the abandoned space. While the tower was his studio, it was also a dangerous structure he attempted to rehabilitate and bring back to life amidst the construction of a new shopping center. Phillips writes,

There is so much labor and industry soiling everything here. Anything I do seems laughably insignificant, but maybe to reflect on what has happened here is most important now. I see myself in opposition to the development going on, the Price Rite and its corn-syrup filled aisles, the parking lots, the mind numbingly generic retail chains that march toward my tower. Yet the industry of the paper mill erased some other thing, a house, a tree, a pond, a store, a family history, made the river poisonous, and many of its infinite bricks laid by slave hands, all this driven by the same mad force that erases our memory and curiosity with the parking lot malls of our time. I think as much as I try, the most interesting thing I can do here is observe and observe and observe. All my attempts at building fail, it is not to be done here. The tower is perfect how it is.

Phillips' exhibition, River Street, is a reflection on his time at the tower through a series of video projections onto objects and detritus excavated from the site. Once unearthed, Phillips stacks and arranges the debris onto topographical “screens” which host moving projections of the tower and its surroundings. Contrasting the staid materials of rock, concrete, steel, and brick with dynamic and active images, Phillips creates tension between the object and video as a painting. Vertical and horizontal piles lean against the wall, featuring colorful, painterly imagery that highlights specific spaces, buildings, and views of the landscape. Throughout, Phillips tries to encapsulate the awe and marvel of encountering an historic space once a major center of human activity and now in ruins.

Phillips' repurposing of the abandoned tower and use of the found landscape as canvas recalls the work of earlier artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. Yet while Matta-Clark and Smithson physically reshaped architecture and lanscape, Phillips' practice emphasizes observation and reflection, using the tower as an intermediary between past and present. The glowing apertures of the abandoned building display images which portray River Street's multiple identities, awakening a distant spatial memory of previous histories. A struggle to physically connect his practice with the rituals of daily labor and human activity that for centuries defined River Street pervades Phillips' work. While the projections offer a sense of activity and renewal, they pass ghost-like over fossilized, unmoving ground.

Daniel Phillips received his BA from Williams College and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His MFA thesis exhibition was held at Tufts University in 2009.