{"id":96490,"date":"2025-09-27T08:52:21","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T15:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=96490"},"modified":"2025-10-08T08:11:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T15:11:34","slug":"stacy-phillips-imagined-faces-invite-us-to-see-our-shared-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/stacy-phillips-imagined-faces-invite-us-to-see-our-shared-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Stacy Phillips\u2019 Imagined Faces Invite Us to See Our Shared Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stacy Phillips, \u201cStill We Rise, Maya Angelou”<\/p><\/div>\n

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You may write me down in history
\nWith your bitter, twisted lies,
\nYou may trod me in the very dirt
\nBut still, like dust, I’ll rise.<\/h4>\n

Maya Angelou\u2019s flawless quatrain receives a response in Stacy Phillips’<\/a> Let\u2019s Get Personal: Faces of Humanity<\/em>, currently on view at Finch Lane. In \u201cStill We Rise, Maya Angelou,\u201d nearly 16 square feet of work surface has been assembled from numerous odd blocks which, once heavily handwritten upon, accept the addition of 36 vivid and unnaturally colored heads of anonymous men (and a few women?), then another layer of scribbling added over that. A viewer who saw this work before any of Phillips\u2019 others might reasonably question their being called \u201cportraits.\u201d But seen in the context of the rest of Let\u2019s Get Personal<\/em>, the whole work may rightly be seen as an attempt to push the portrait as far as possible away from its finite, limited role in identification and into the artistic territory Phillips refers to as \u201cthe common ground we share as humans.\u201d<\/h4>\n

There are, in fact, 32 distinct works here, half of which are collected together as the \u201cRaw Surface Series #1-16,\u201d each 11×14 inches. The rest, with the exception of \u201cStill We Rise,\u201d initially resemble conventional portraits, though in fact they would seem to depict subjects who never have existed. What they all have in common is less concern with identity and a far greater interest on the artist\u2019s part in the elaboration of their materials. That, along with her intuitive relation to those media. What can she use and how can she use it? While her experience is a part of the process, she equates it to curiosity. What she can make of it.<\/h4>\n
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Stacy Phillips, \u201cRaw Surface Series #1-16\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

Where the envelope, so to speak, gets pushed the furthest is in the Raw Surface Series. Here she glues oddly shaped pieces of various materials in seemingly random places on her panels. Some of these she then paints on, while to others she adds printed papers of various sorts. The paints, when they happen, follow an entire range of mark-making practices. Some of the faces are almost conventional, while others recall the legendary critical dismissal of Marcel Duchamp\u2019s \u201cNude Descending a Staircase\u201d\u2014that it resembles an explosion in a shingle factory.<\/h4>\n

In the rest of the gallery, the titles are as clever and challenging as the images. A palimpsest comes about when an image is scraped off a parchment page so it can be reused for a new picture, and in this way \u201cPalimpsest of Kin\u201d suggests that the family resemblance between the two women\u2014sisters, one wonders, or mother and daughter?\u2014could have been generated by replacing one face with another that shared the same influences.<\/h4>\n

In an unacknowledged pair, meanwhile, a woman is said to be \u201cFor Those Who Weigh Without a Crown,\u201d while a man bears up under \u201cThe Weight of the Invisible Crown.\u201d Picasso\u2019s famous 1905 portrait of Gertrude Stein might come to mind here, more or less in the way that friends of Stein said no one would see her likeness in the finished work. Picasso\u2019s response that \u201cSHE would\u201d proved correct, while Stein understood from the first of 80 posing sessions that in the beginning it would\u2019t look much like her\u2014but would in time, as portraits inevitably must once they replace access to the original. Set aside the issues raised by the verisimilitude of painted portraits and it becomes apparent these portraits have so many charming details it could only seem stingy to dwell on matters of mere resemblance.<\/h4>\n