Danica Phelps: Saving Time
thirtyseven°
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By Ginny Gordon
Sunscreen
The concept behind the current Danica Phelps show is relatively straightforward: Phelps brought flowers and trash into the gallery and arranged them together in large, almost childlike installations, and then drew the flowers as they began to wilt. The drawings you can buy, the installations will get thrown back into the garbage at the end of the exhibition. Danica Phelps is very good at drawing - so good that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has collected her work. But in this case, it's the installations that dominate the space.
As the weeks go on, the show is morphing from a cheerful riot into something deeply creepy and disturbing. As the flowers decompose, the drawings remain unchanged, as cheerful and as sprightly as ever. As Phelps no doubt realises, the only time in which flowers are left to rot in public without being cleared away is when they are part of a memorial to the dead.
At the centre of the room is an upside-down café umbrella entirely wreathed in meadow blossoms of various kinds. At the opening it looked like a floral satellite dish set up to receive esoteric messages from deep space on behalf of lovers of the baroque and feminine frou frou. It smelt delicious. A fortnight later the flowers have wilted and stuck to the umbrella's pole, and it doesn't smell so good. And then of course one realises what it looks like: an improvised shrine at the site of a traffic accident.
The title of the exhibition, Saving Time isn't about convenience: it's about loss. It's about the fly in the still life that promises decay, and it forms a self-referential memorial. This is clever: by removing the object of mourning, by isolating the circuit to include only the flowers and their representation, Phelps avoids any hint of the histrionic, and just leaves us with a minimalist fable of death and decay. Ginny Gordon