Jade Phillips

Jade Phillips explores selfhood, perception, and the one constant in life: change. It’s reflected through her kaleidoscopic, almost aqueous, portraits. Her paintings are figurative and abstract at once. They are informed by a deep devotion to her drawing and painting practice and so are hyper- realistic in their detail, yet they are pure imagination in their blurred, specular intensity.

Phillips paints the briefest of moments—the split-second between the glance in a mirror. As well as, the recognition that the organism looking back is both ourself and not ourself. The mirror stage, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says, is when the infant first identifies themselves in a mirror and realizes they are a thing in the world. But, of course, the image isn’t real; it’s backwards, it’s merely a reflection. Phillips’s subject is this jarring, slippery instant, the uncanny recognition that happens each time we catch sight of ourselves.

Her greens, pinks, blues, and yellows bleed into one another. Creating a watery reflection of the face. But the colors continue beyond the figure. Then into the background becoming an extension of the person. In a sense, Phillips’s subjects are engulfed in themselves. Immersed in a background that is an embodiment of that captured moment—their inner life.