Noah Travis Phillips
Helter Skelter? (AKA Index of First Lines)
(as though @) KDR 305, Miami, FL
Noah Travis Phillips
Helter Skelter? ( AKA Index of First Lines)
first week of December 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE (& EXTENDED) RELEASE
KDR305 presents, Helter Skelter? (AKA Index of First Lines) ~ An exhibition featuring new work by Noah Travis Phillips.
1)
as we enter, one image announces the exhibition with a question, like the title-track. and looks to be sung by a chorus of masked figures, --- tribal tattoos and solar currency, ancient gods (plural) dancing with the Sun (as anti-vampirism charm).
in another corner --- camouflage, outtakes from “Acoustic Guitar” results from the artist’s “AI” RIVAL, (feat. planetary storms, Jack Kirby thumbprint, woman eating red moon w/ wolves, ... ), 100 Suns, Andy Warhol flowers and source/reference /
flock of parrots flying, flowers in fire sunrise, Jennifer Lord fire painting.
another room features bodies: dancing, torqued, acrobatic, celestial, fragmentary, Futuristic, as it modulates adjacent to landscapes ...
landscapes extend, allegories mutate and multiply, ...
2)
monochrome mise en scène (multiple materialities and energetic forms), NTP skateramp to heaven ("admiral"), excerpt from Garden for Grandpa (2008), circular bonfire on mountaintop
different materialities intra-act: dripping smearing pulled paint and caustics form 3D modeled jewels / two figures: one with long orange hair, the other dressed in emerald robes approach / hot quartet, solstice sun in stonehenge megalithic arch, breast through jungle door threshold, forest fire painting, and flowers at smoky sunrise,
Who Art Thou, White Face by Leonora Carrington makes an appearance, as if in some communion with Dürer's Melencolia I
two versions of a mural of Jim Morrison within a website the artist was sued for,
a mysterious and ambiguous annual calendar for the year 2032, and a fram being constructed, ...
special imaging to reveal Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing accompanies outtakes from a millennial collaborative artbook with Jennifer Lord, House/Field Book,
--- giant skeleton being excavated, predator claws, unknown wildflowers (scarlet & white)
black & white marbling, and mirror in the desert on rocks reflecting the blue sky w/ clouds
3)
outtakes from Blue Dream /Fantasy in the stairwell; feat. Salvador Dali’s Alchimie Des Philosophes the Emerald Tablet and an outtake from Noah’s extensive Warming Structures series ...
blue-purple fog, blue cosmos, and stack of dice (on blue)
... Paradise (according to Jean Rhys - Sleep It off Lady) / blue dream, sleeping labyrinth puzzle, and flowers w/ Xerxes Moth
These new collage works (photomechanical reproduction, digital fabrication) are a series of expanded folios Phillips has remediated into tableaux, created alongside their multi-scaled internet artworks and installations. The collages act as a repository and drama of a fertile archive, and symbolic accumulation,they function as amplifiers, as a record of their recent mythic life. Change, risk, conflict, strife, death – and of course fantasy & romance, so central to the artist’s oeuvre – are all apparent. Images (read here also “things”) take on qualities they were not expected to have. Similar to the artist’s mood boards and handmade books, these collages become a metaphysical reflection of myth-making, personal and universal archetypes interchange like figure and ground. Over time they become more than a collection of images and a pseudo-semiotic structure eventually emerges.
The collages refuse to adhere to “the rules” and are unguided by preexisting ideas, either of the artist's own making or that of aesthetic culture itself. The results become combinations of these elements in their rhythmic complexity and ambiguity, interconnection(s) and tensions. Cognitive estrangement and inmixing anthropocene novum pose a challenge to a hegemonic sense of vision + meaning.
Sensations of simultaneity and double-(or even triple-)vision occur as corners are turned (upon second glance / on second thought…) something like a story develops from these collage constellations of synergetic imagery. Some repetitions of images, motifs/themes) suggest transformation and others gesture toward shifts in perspective. Noah’s worlds form around the indistinction between subjects & objects – each becomes the other, here and throughout. Metaphysical introversion, reflections on the inner reaches of outer-space. What the images once were and now are …( and their present becoming) / related images repeat in modulation (transformation and stability, simultaneity). Particularly asymmetric combinations of relationship and individuality (which is one way we might understand metaphor and allegory) echo and unresolved poetics ...
KDR305 is a contemporary exhibition space housed in a 101 yr old (1920) cottage in the heart of Little Havana
in Miami, FL.
What you are seeing is not a news broadcast.
