(Denver, CO) RULE Gallery is pleased to present Jade Phillips: Reflection Pool, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. A public reception will be held on Saturday, October 28, from 7-9 p.m. and the exhibition will be on view through December 30, 2023.
“The function of the mirror stage…is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality.”
—Jacques Lacan
In Reflection Pool Jade Phillips explores selfhood, perception, and the one constant in life: change. It’s reflected through her kaleidoscopic, almost aqueous, portraits. Her paintings are figurative and abstract at once. They are informed by a deep devotion to her drawing and painting practice and so are hyper-realistic in their detail, yet they are pure imagination in their blurred, specular intensity. Phillips paints the briefest of moments—the split-second between the glance in a mirror and the recognition that the organism looking back is both ourself and not ourself. The mirror stage, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says, is when the infant first identifies themselves in a mirror and realizes they are a thing in the world. But, of course, the image isn’t real; it’s backwards, it’s merely a reflection. Phillips’s subject is this jarring, slippery instant, the uncanny recognition that happens each time we catch sight of ourselves.
Her greens, pinks, blues, and yellows bleed into each other to create a watery reflection of the face. But the colors continue beyond the figure and into the background which becomes an extension of the person. In a sense, Phillips’s subjects are engulfed in themselves, immersed in a background that is an embodiment of that captured moment—their inner life.
Phillips incorporates thin paint layers that reveal stunning depth of character and scene. She describes making art as a flow state akin to that transcendent headspace one enters when absolutely focused. Through her process she communicates the complication of our own awareness - that we are a many-layered thing made of memory after memory, feeling after feeling. She invites us, as viewers, into a contemplative space where we watch the subject watch themselves—reminded, eventually, of ourselves. All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors, Lacan says. We stand before Phillips’s thoughtful, complicated portraits and begin absorbing the reflections of our shared reality.
Jade Phillips (b. 1995, Centralia, IL) is an emerging artist living and working in Austin, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design with Summa Cum Laude honors in 2016. Phillips was recognized with a number of scholarships during her time at RMCAD, such as the Carla Miranda and Dustin Peletier Memorial Award through the Philip J. Steel Foundation. She went on to graduate from Eastern Illinois University with a Master's in Studio Art in 2018. She has exhibited work in galleries throughout Illinois, Colorado and Texas.