Gravy Train Rehearsal sets gravy-filled coal cars in continuous motion through a miniature landscape resembling the Rocky Mountains and Continental Divide/Colorado Plateau, and more broadly the United States. Equal parts satire and speculative proposal, Phillips transforms the familiar model railway into a maquette for an intentionally impossible public artwork, inviting viewers to imagine freight trains filled to the brim with gravy traversing the nation. The title echoes both the idiom of the "gravy train" and the cynical refrain of Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar", situating the work within a broader critique of ambition, excess, and the machinery of success. In this sense, Gravy Train Rehearsal participates in a lineage of speculative projects by Robert Smithson and Chris Burden, where the conceptual proposition often exceeds its physical realization. Through poetic absurdity and dark humor, the work satirizes capitalist greed, waste, and exploitation.
bio
Noah Travis Phillips is an experimental collage artist working with their private media archive of “made, found, and modified” images to interrelate the personal, mythological, occult, cultural, and ecological. Their practice explores the posthuman and the Anthropocene through a range of digital and physical formats. In tandem, they aim to subtly insert themselves into art history by cultivating a personal legend or parafiction.
They are an artist, educator, and scholar. (BA, Naropa University, Fine Art and Environmental Studies; MFA, University of Denver, Emergent Digital Practices). They are Assistant Professor & FabLab (Z-Space) Coordinator at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. They have exhibited extensively locally, nationally, internationally, and virtually.