Danica Phelps

Zach Feuer Gallery, New York
Gallery 151, New York

Unframed; in good condition aside from slight surface dirt along the edges. Markings in pencil (artist's notes) all along overlap.
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Danica Phelps's art is a narrative documentation of her everyday life reconstructed through the cash flow generated by her expenses and income. In her early works Phelps would record her emotional and practical experiences by combining charts with drawings. In her recent body of work the artist conceptualizes her analysis into a more minimal mapping which further culminates into the creation of a stripe factory. Fiscal, 2004, is a seminal example from this series. The linear tape-collage is an organized and rigorous encounter of her daily financial movements. Green represents the money earned and red the money spent, while grey records her outstanding debt. This obsessive exercise is the artist's attempt to translate life into a tangible entity. Although Phelps exposes her personal experiences, sometimes also through explanatory letters, such as her honeymoon, her lately rediscovered sex life or her recent trip to India in order to get pregnant, her technique differs from other artists such as Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas.  The artist collects her personal data concerning the different aspects of her life and transforms it into a flow of stripes of tape on panels. Phelps's compulsive and accurate documentation of her personal existence results in a "cheerful celebration of the quotidian." (Leffingwell, Edward, "Danica Phelps at LFL", Art in America, April 2004, pp. 127-128)