| Danica Phelps is best known for her drawings and paintings that expose intimate aspects of her personal life with a remarkably systematic diligence. Stark illustrations depict her daily activities, from the mundane to the erotic, while painted stripes denote the frequency of both. She also carefully tracks and displays her financial transactions in this manner, creating tableaus of the aforementioned stripes, with debt, credit, and cash assigned different colors. |  |
Éva Pelczer
Danica Phelps, Stripe Factory for Sister Gallery, LA, 20,000 stripes, November 2007, 2007. Watercolor and gouache on paper on panel, 20 x 15 in. Courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery.
Danica Phelps is best known for her drawings and paintings that expose intimate aspects of her personal life with a remarkably systematic diligence. Stark illustrations depict her daily activities, from the mundane to the erotic, while painted stripes denote the frequency of both. She also carefully tracks and displays her financial transactions in this manner, creating tableaus of the aforementioned stripes, with debt, credit, and cash assigned different colors. In 2002, Phelps went so far as to move her apartment, complete with dog and girlfriend, into the gallery for her show entitled Integrating Sex into Everyday Life. By choosing to make public what most would consider deeply private, Phelps subverts the voyeuristic power of the viewer and makes it her own. She is not the first artist to place her intimate self on display (Mary Kelly and Tracy Emin immediately come to mind), but the originality of her approach to logging her activities sets her apart. Phelps approaches obsessive-compulsivity in her works such as March 7-14, 2004, one of many whose titles simply mark a length of time and in which activities and finances are meticulously recorded without graphics. She conveys a detached amusement at the purported value of art; there is full disclosure of the money she receives for the very work that is on display. Even works that have been sold can be bought over and over again in the form of a traced copy, replaced in the gallery with a tracing of the “new” work. Marked with stripes indicating the amount received for each piece, these “receipts” are also displayed, and yes, for sale. The irony of this infinite loop of art and money, based on the representation of the most mundane elements of an individual life, is rather brilliant.
Phelps continues to explore the power of transparency in her most recent work, a series entitled Stripe Factory. These canvases consist solely of painted stripes, the only physical element retained from Phelps’ earlier work. Employing over 14 people at a time, Phelps and her assistants create dense fields of stripes for paying clients, at the rate of fifteen cents a stripe with a minimum order of 20,000. In an open letter describing the project to potential buyers, Phelps asserts that the purpose is “purely visual” and “unmoored” to personal data. The conceptual continuity from her earlier work is subtle; she is now interested in the compiled physical impression of many different people rendering the same, simple mark. The abstraction of the paintings is difficult to decipher; they are nearly hieroglyphic, dizzyingly dense, and true to the artist’s statement, unmoored. Except, of course, to payment—the monetary value of each painting is its only purpose and element. Each stripe is worth 15 cents.
