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Joseph Phillips & Shawn Smith

Presented by D Berman Gallery at D Berman Gallery

August 26-October 9, 2010

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d berman gallery is pleased to present work by Austin artists Joseph Phillips and Shawn Smith whose seemingly whimsical works seriously examine human interaction with the natural world and the often artificial attempts to control and perceive it.

The delicate gouache works on paper in Joseph Phillips’ current body of work are subtly satirical explorations of imagined utopias and play with ideas of land commodification. The works in this series depict pre-fabricated land units that could theoretically be dropped into place in affluent suburban sprawl. These darkly humorous and visually compelling drawings are also beautifully rendered works in their own right. Phillips uses a specific and limited palette of soothing colors for his counterfeit environments to reference the consumer aspect of his modular land units, not unlike images in a catalogue

Shawn Smith’s meticulously created and fantastical sculptures present un-natural nature to a society increasingly influenced and reliant on television and computers for a digital window to the natural world. Their pixilated, abstracted forms are immediately engaging and seemingly familiar. Smith says, “My conceptual and material practice explores digital identity, color, colliding systems of information, labor, technology, and science. As an object maker, I am interested in relating these concepts back to the symbiotic connection between the hand and the ‘thing.’. … Readily available images make us believe that we ‘know’ these natural objects but we really only identify patterns of pixilated light. … I see my building process as an experiment in alchemy using man-made composite materials to represent natural forms.”