“Hazards May Be Present” centers around a large-scale video installation, comprised of 21 hand-drawn frames that form a looping animation of the 1946 nuclear test that eventually caused the irradiation of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The video can be viewed here, complete with an original composition by L.A.–based film composer Rafael Leloup.
Through the lens of re-examined historical documentation, the exhibition explores the history surrounding the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and how one event forever shaped the physical and social fabric of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.
“Each of the drawings comes directly from an actual, recorded moment, and together they create a sense of dislocation — are the images truthful? A dream? It is this tension between imagination and reality, actual past and imagined apocalypse, that I wish to explore,” Phillips says. “This is a history that should have been burned into our collective cultural psyche, and yet our social ambivalence and amnesia are such that many are unaware of these events entirely.”
As a counterpoint to the historical images, the show is balanced by a series of contemporary still lifes, testaments to the ongoing impact of one event on the substrate of an entire neighborhood.
In addition to the debut of this new body of work, the exhibition reception will also be the release of Phillips’s brand-new monograph, “No Regrets in Life.”
“Hazards May Be Present” is on view through December 22, 2018, at Hashimoto Contemporary (San Francisco, CA).
Upcoming: “The Future Was Now,” , January–April 2019 at Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa, OK).
Sign up to receive Fine Art Today, the free weekly e-newsletter from
Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.
