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Artist Talks: Terri Phillips & Emily C. Thomas
03/01/18
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
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Crosstown Arts resident artists Terri Phillips and Emily C. Thomas will discuss their work currently on view in “Don’t Look for My Heart” (West Gallery) and “Imprismed” (East Gallery), respectively. Terri’s exhibition is on view through March 11. Emily’s exhibition will remain on view through March 8.
About Terri Phillips:
Phillips draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions, including sculpture, performance, film, installation, sound, and photography. Her work incorporates humble materials and everyday objects to create scenes of magic realism based on an abstracted narrative of the artist’s history. Phillips choses materials based on their tactile and sensual qualities to provoke intuitive responses that include the viewer in completing the process of the narrative. Together these elements transform the experience with the intimacy of memory and the subconscious. She returns to Memphis after completing her education at California Institute of the Arts, Beaux-Arts, and Pepperdine University and has exhibited and curated internationally.
About Emily C. Thomas:
Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Emily C. Thomas is an interdisciplinary, project-based artist who has lived and worked in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Memphis, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She received a BFA from NYU in 2009 and a MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2015.
Thomas’ practice is a holistic response to the fragmentation of consciousness, resulting from institutionalized segregation of knowledge and the classification of individuals into cultural, social, gender, and human vs. nonhuman roles. Acting as a medium, she conjures visions of trans-rational and transpersonal realms that dissolve divisions within consciousness.
She materializes these visionary states through installation, animation, film, sculpture, painting, and sound to fabricate self-reflecting worlds of initiatory experience. As cognizant of the digital as she is of the archaic (a time when the disciplines of philosophy, science, religion, magic, and art were one unified field of exploration), her work often juxtaposes the concepts of Enlightenment within Eastern and New Age spiritual practices and The Scientific Revolution’s Age of Enlightenment that developed within 18th-century Europe.
Her imagery frequently alludes to the practice of observing color, light, and darkness as a way to gain insight into the spiritual and scientific nature of reality. Her work is created by equal parts research, imagination, and hands-on experimentation with materials and technology. The result is an aesthetic that embraces elements of the handmade alongside digital and obsolete technologies.
