About the Exhibition:
Untitled: Dad Drew All of My Book Report Posters is a solo exhibition from Pat Phillips, featuring new works on paper. Paper was an early site for Phillips to explore forms, materials, and the act of drawing itself. Materially, it was readily available growing up, whether at home by the printer or on shelves at Walmart. An early introduction to drawing for Phillips was his father, who would regularly draw his children’s favorite toys or save the day when they came to him with a blank poster board the night before a school project was due.
As Phillips got older and began writing graffiti, he dove into his sketched world to develop letter structures and test color combinations using Krylon and Rust-Oleum before painting boxcars in the train yard. Paper became an important space for him to experiment with how gestures created lines and how lines created letters. Unlike working on paper, a painted boxcar would leave the yard and travel across North America, leaving no opportunity to readjust its letters or shadows. On paper, ideas could be tested, altered, and layered. They could be visually resolved or continue to remain open-ended and experimental.
Paper has remained an honest and vulnerable space for experimentation in Phillips’s practice. His works demonstrate his visual reasoning through graphite, ink, paint, and collage. The works explore how one material can build upon another while allowing marks and gestures to remain visible as part of the process. The drawings do not need to resolve into finished statements; instead, they offer space for experimentation, memory, and discovery. The works on paper return to something foundational: the simple act of drawing, where a mark can be made, tested, changed, and followed wherever it leads.
