No object exists without its double, no form without an opposite. Phillips’s dainty assemblies of ceramic, steel, and PVC tube exist only as much as something else—the artist’s body and mind, for example—took a lead in shaping them.
The resulting inanimate masks, saddles, and tongues brim with desire. Phillips carefully suspends them in balance, which negates any idle negation. Instead, the sculptures attest that their original lacked something too, itself borne from a chain of such very lack.
Philips dwells on this line’s undeniability, bringing, for example, male and female forms too close for their own comfort. Their quasi-sexual, quasi-medical shapes are hard to own up to. To deny where they came from, however, is impossible.
