KultureFlash [Review]

by Vit Wagner

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.