Danica Phelps: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607
Kavi Gupta is proud to present a solo exhibition by New York based artist Danica Phelps. Danica Phelps is known for documenting her life through skillful fluid line drawings and has been painting intricate stripe charts formulated using her own simple monetary system for the past ten years. This project has illustrated important events in the artist’s life through the filter of her personal finances. Her stripe paintings recently became a larger project referred to as The Stripe Factory where the process became unmoored from her personal data and self-referential to the individuals hired to produce these works.
Phelps has made several installations utilizing the ephemeral nature of flowers and will continue this project for her exhibition at Kavi Gupta. Fresh flowers are combined with discarded cardboard, plastic and other waste materials that she arranges in an intuitive and playful manner, hinting to a makeshift roadside shrine. The room at first is filled with the fresh pungent smell of flowers and life, but as time passes the smell becomes more unpleasant emphasizing the inevitable outcome. During this process drawings are produced of the flowers as they begin to wilt. After the flowers eventually die, the drawings are all that remain to document their existence. This subtle metaphor speaks to notions of preserving time and holding on to the impossible.
The use of flowers is loaded as they are used as symbols in every momentous event of people’s lives from birth to death. They are decorative, ceremonial and markers of passing time. In its entirety, Phelp’s work can be seen as a poetic act of reflecting. A fascination with the unknown and examination of life on a small scale, trying to come to terms with it, but never being able to truly understand.
Danica Phelps (b. 1971) lives and works in New York, NY. Phelps has recently had solo exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery, NY; Ritter/Zamet, London; Thirtyseven degrees, Sydney; Sister, Los Angeles; and Dina4 Projekte, Munich. Selected group exhibitions include shows at Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Naples, Italy; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; The New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville, KY; Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY.
