Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Pat Phillips
65
Floor 5
Born 1987 in Lakenheath, United Kingdom
Lives in Pineville, LA
Pat Phillips’s paintings combine personal and historical imagery into surreal juxtapositions, drawing on his experience living in the American South to meditate on complex questions of race, class, labor, and a militarized culture. In The Farm—a title that refers to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, and the 1998 documentary of the same name—hands gripping hoes suggest the continuum between plantation slave labor and the labor of imprisoned people today. The repetition of the phrase “don’t tread on me” in two of the works references the Gadsden flag, which was created during the American Revolution and has resurfaced as a symbol of the Tea Party, a conservative political group. For the mural Phillips incorporated fencing, simultaneously symbolizing incarceration, the insulation of suburbia, and the U.S.–Mexico border. The fence also partially obscures images of a holster, a gun, and tear-gas canisters; while all of these objects suggest a violence that runs through American culture and our institutions, Phillips leaves it to the viewer to determine their significance.
Mandingo / DON'T TREAD ON ME, 2018
Pat Phillips, Mandingo / DON'T TREAD ON ME, 2018. Acrylic, oil pastel, airbrush, and aerosol paint on canvas, 52 × 60 in. (132.1 × 152.4 cm). Image courtesy of the artist
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Pat Phillips
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Pat Phillips: My name is Pat Phillips. I'm a painter. I live and work in Pineville, Louisiana.
Narrator: Phillips painted this mural over the course of a few days, shortly before the Biennial opened. In it, he worked with some of the same ideas that are in the two large canvases nearby.
Pat Phillips: The work's dealing with the prison system in Louisiana, playing on the idea of inclusion, and exclusive concept of where I grew up, and the suburban neighborhood that I lived in.
My dad was in the military for thirty years, and then after retiring from the military, eventually he ended up becoming a lieutenant at a prison.
Narrator: The prisoners appear as disembodied hands and arms. In one of the canvases, they wrestle with a snake inspired by the Gadsden flag. The symbol was designed during the Revolutionary War and bears the words "DON'T TREAD ON ME" underneath the image of a rattlesnake, and has since been reappropriated by the conservative political group, the Tea Party.
Pat Phillips: As a kid, we would get a lot of things made by the prisoners, so the prisoners were not just working within the community—whether it was doing road work or things to help save tax dollars—but in Louisiana, you'd also go places like the lumberyard and things like that, and see how companies would outsource the prisoners for labor. And for me personally, I would always get my snake belt made by the prisoners.
So the idea with this painting of this prisoner wrestling with this snake is wrestling with this idea of how they are essentially like the working force within the community.
Using humor or these objects and symbols that are a little bit more childlike, I think for me, because while I am still a Black male in America, and I still do have to worry about the sort of statistics and things like that, that I could fall into, I'm trying to acknowledge that I'm naïve to some of these subjects too, and I’m just trying to work through the process, conceptually and aesthetically, with the painting.