Bio:
Joel Daniel Phillips is an American artist whose work focuses on the tenets of classical draftsmanship employed in monumental formats. Inspired by the depth and breadth of human experience, he strives to tell the personal and societal histories etched in the world around him. The focus of his work centers on questions of truth, historical amnesia, and the veracity of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective pasts. The drawings are re-contextualizations of archival historical material, and walk the line between describing a shared, forgotten history and prophesying a terrifying, Orwellian future.
Phillips’ work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries across the United States as well as abroad, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, The Art Museum of South Texas, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Gilcrease Museum of Art, and the Ackland Art Museum, among others. In 2016 he was the 3rd prize recipient in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the artist is currently a Fellow at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Phillips’ is represented by Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, CA and New York, NY. His drawings can be found in the public collections of the Ackland Art Museum, the Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art, the West Collection, the Gilcrease Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and the Denver Art Museum.
Statement:
“Killing the Negative” is a new series of drawings in response to a subset of the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) foundational commissioned photographs of the Great Depression. These images are of course, well known, and images like “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange have become some of the most recognizable and important images in the American photographic lexicon. Less known, however, is the process by which these images were selected for publication: Roy Stryker was the head of the FSA, and for the first four years of the project, many images he deemed unworthy were “killed” by punching a hole in the original negative.
As always, my own creative process is inherently about labor, and against the modern backdrop of instant, image-driven gratification, I have found the physical process involved in the painstaking, craft-driven renderings in response to these images to be one of deep meditation. I am fascinated with Stryker’s destructive editing process as a commentary on truth and the veracity of the historical record. These images point out the flaws in our reliance on this record, calling into startling clarity the power that a single individual had to shape the collective understanding of an entire nation.
More particularly, the larger contemporary political debate is one that makes many of the questions from the era of the Great Depression deeply resonant; questions of race, class, labor and compensation, land ownership, stratified socio-economics, and ecological protection are embedded in the original censored FSA photographs. These almost 100-year-old images are astonishingly contemporary in nature, and when recontextualized as a series of drawings, call into question our assumptions about the truth of our collective past, while simultaneously reflecting on the fabricated foundations of historical narratives in the modern political sphere.
www.joeldanielphillips.com
