July 2004
Laura Sue Phillips
New York, NY
proflsp@earthlink.netMFA, Painting, Hunter College, NY
BFA, Printmaking, California College of the Arts, CAArtist's Statement:
Abstraction for Dogs is an ongoing project of site-specific paintings made on and in response to things discarded by humans, both in the city and in more rural or suburban settings.Each painting is photographed after its completion and then left where it is created either to be picked up by sanitation workers, or to break down organically together with its host.
The form of these paintings is rooted in my years as a purely visual abstract geometric painter. The context is always changing depending on the site, the object, the ambient colors, the weather, and the people walking by as I paint.
The more I make this work, the less I seem to care about traditional paintings displayed on a wall. The act of making a painting in public on detritus takes away the elevated values, which we tend to associate with visual art. Abstraction for Dogs is not just trashy and temporary; it is flagrantly anti-art in its absence of an exchangeable commodity.
