The strength of the show lies in how it orchestrates a play of ideas
without over-determining our reception of them. Things hang together,
but loosely, and there is a lot of room for creative meaning-making
on the part of the viewer. Thus, we meet Paulette Phillips’s
DVD installation Crosstalk in which a number of artists, critics
and other participants in the Toronto art scene are shown dressed
in business attire, traversing a busy downtown intersection (another
seat of power). These men and women look at the camera as they pass
by, and their emotions: suspicion, curiosity, contempt, ennui. Instead
of the artists being the spectacle, we, the viewers, are given that
role and the alienation and discomfort that go along with it.
Sarah Milroy The
Globe & Mail (January 2007)
A strong forensic thread runs through the five video installations that
make up Canadian artist Paulette Phillips' exhibition "The Secret Life
of Criminals." The narrative traces of the events depicted in these
video suggest traumatic undercurrents. Coaxing the viewer into the role
of detective, these works compel us to pay attention to their details, in
case we miss a vital clue. The Floating House (2002) oscillates
in its mien between the real and the simulated. One minute we see a model
of a house floating on the Atlantic Ocean, slowly sinking; the next minute
we are sucked in to a catastrophic event as the lens zoomes into experience
the trauma of inundataion. All the works in this show have emotive hooks
that seduce us into a suspension of disbelief.
Something strange is happening to us at a road intersection in Crosstalk
(2004). The viewer becomes identified with the camera as it looks out from
a scene of... what? A crime? An accident? A performance? Passing pedestrians
turns to stare at us. What bizarre event are we involved in? This staged
video has a Jeff Wall feel but transcends Wall by implicating the viewer
in the action. Instead of being voyeur here, we have become the object of
the voyeur's gaze.
Roy Exley Flash
Art (July - September 2004)
If you've ever witnessed crisis as it unfolds
within the confines of someone else's world and taken it away with you,
unsettled by what you've seen, here's an opportunity to explore the possibilities
this emotional other-worldliness presents. A series of films and image-based
installations, recent work by Paulette Phillips emerges from the darker
passages that wind through the primordial substance in which all of our
everyday lives are suspended. The Secret Lives of Criminals is an abstraction
of the events surrounding the unsolved murder of a middle-aged woman.
Phillips' work uses the reality proposed by this unsolved crime to invite
us into the labyrinth of the subconscious and to reconcile the realms
of the safe and the sublime. Using the stage for such a visual "theatre
of the uncanny" as set by the imagery supposed by Sylvia Plath or projected
by Eija-Liisa Maria Ahtila as a point of origin, the distinctly feminine
and subtly frantic works distort any concept of the home, quite literally
setting it afloat in treacherous waters. Phillips' work upsets the foundations
of home and family, and commits to the dissolution of the perceived safety
surrounding all that is solid, sane and secure.
Kultureflash
(May 2004)
Paulette Phillips' video loop, "It's about
how people judge appearance." is really hard to watch even though
it's only a minute long. I watched for only 30 seconds before I left the
room... which begs the question why is this clip intolerable when images
just like this are on tv each night? I called the artist, Phillips: "I
think it's psychologically intense because it's self inflicted, it isn't
victim based brutality. Had I stayed to the end I would have seen the
woman pick herself up and give a defiant glance to the camera before moving
on." When I heard that I thought I would probably watch the video
again next time, which also means, like television, happy endings can
dull your senses.
Catherine Osborne, Lola 8 winter 2000-2001
"LOCKJAW is a dense and witty monologue by
the film maker on concerns ranging from feminism to the place of art in
contemporary society. The central metaphore, that of the protagonist having
found herself literally unable to speak is in ironic contrast to the non-stop
text of the performance itself. Irreverant, beautifully performed and
shot at times with tongue firmly in cheek, the film evokes Phillips' characteristic
intelligence and insight."
Images'93
catalogue
"Rarely has video been employed as fluidly
and with as much purpose as it is in writer/director Paulette Phillips'
intelligent new drama."
Vit Wagner, the Toronto
Star on CONTROLLING INTEREST