Danica Phelps

Dan­ica Phelps is first and foremost a draugh­tswoman. In this medium she keeps a diary, and for over ten years has been painstakingly doc­u­ment­ing every aspect of her daily life as an artist. Exe­cuted in elegant pencil lines, she metic­u­lously cat­a­logues the rit­u­als of every­day life: waking up, walking the dogs, gro­cery shopping, sex, argu­ments, making up. In her works Phelps cre­ates a unique blend of abs­trac­tion, con­ceptual sys­tem­at­ics, fig­u­ra­tive line—and exhi­bi­tion­ism. She has laid bare her com­ing out and the tempestu­ous rela­tion­ship with her girl­friend Debi in unadul­ter­ated erotic draw­ings and diary entries (“A Book of D’s”). She directly engages with issues such as the cre­ation of value, or the struc­tures of the art mar­ket, by laying bare her costs of liv­ing down to the last cent—and by cre­at­ing works that in turn deal with her own eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion. To this end she cre­ated “charts” where a red stripe stands for a Dollar spent, and a green stripe for a Dollar earned. The pur­chase of a small house in Brooklyn went beyond the scope of this project, lead­ing the artist to found a “Stripe Factory”, where assistants helped her paint some 675,000 stripes. In Novem­ber 2008, Dan­ica Phelps gave birth to her first child, Orion. In a se­ries of draw­ings, installa­tions and stop-motion ani­ma­tion movies cre­ated since then, she allows the pub­lic to partake of the emo­tional and eco­nomic transforma­tions of her every­day life in a sin­gu­larly ten­der and touch­ing manner.