Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present Income’s Outcome (part four), a conceptual drawing project by US artist Danica Phelps to be complemented by works on paper of British artist Katherine Murphy.
Danica Phelps has documented every facet of her life in past and present projects, mostly through drawing. One strand of her work has been a continuous output of delicate line drawings depicting scenes of her everyday routine and experiences in life. In the other strand Phelps has minutely recorded aspects of her life for example through diary-like charts. One feature of this strand is the complete documentation of her income and her expenses, a green stripe for every dollar earned, a red stripe for every dollar spent.
Phelps’ latest project, Income’s Outcome, started in 2012, is the most radical one and tracks the money generated by the sale of each of her drawings. Asked to make a booth for a fair, Phelps decided to withdraw her entire savings and draw everything that she spent that money on, indicating on each drawing how it was spent. Further, she determined how much every drawing is worth in her view, which then became the selling price. Using the proceeds from the first set of drawings, Phelps then made further drawings of everything she spent THAT income on, and so on. Additionally, several tracings or “copies” of all drawings were made and released when the original sold. These “generation drawings” track the buyer, money spent, and money earned, thus recording the history of every work.
Income’s Outcome currently comprises over 250 drawings and growing. In London (part four) there will be the drawings made from the income of her show in Munich (part two), partly made while she travelled to Miami last December to install a booth with her Spanish gallery.
With Income’s Outcome Danica Phelps exposes what is usually kept hidden in a market that is traditionally private and secretive. Phelps opens up her life through her drawings, charts and records, yet what she exposes, though biographical, remains often factual and not evaluated.
The result is a complex economic and documentary system that keeps growing as long as the project is commercially successful.
Katherine Murphy‘s conceptual works circle around the themes of everyday labour and their repetitive, dehumanizing tasks. Like Phelps she uses recording and repetition to reveal work patterns contextually as well as visually. In her “CV series” Murphy charts everyday professional tasks as type written biographies, a highly repetitive task by itself.
Murphy challenges and investigates labour systems. Like Phelps she exposes herself or her subjects to the viewer, yet mainly through documentation or repeated action, not through assessment.
Danica Phelps has an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the US and is part of many museum collections worldwide. She lives and works in Colrain, MA and Brooklyn, NY.
Katherine Murphy has graduated from Slade School of Art in London in 2009 and is part of the gallery’s Breeder program, showcasing and nurturing promising young talents. She lives and works in London.