Concerning the contemporary American landscape and the role language plays- explicit and implicit- within this contextual framework, Phelan's work critically investigates how historically specific models and cultural traditions have been absorbed, co-opted, and repurposed to fit the needs of the popular landscape, engaging the histories of abstraction, conceptual art, and popular culture. Employing both art historical and mass media references the work re-contextualizes/positions mundane and disparate icons of consumer culture with an eye towards both art history & the legacy of Middle America 'life-styling'.

Phelan's Shit Happens... series borrows from the popularized 'Religion Shit List'. The slang phrase used as a simple existential observation that life is full of imperfections - an acknowledgment that bad things happen to people for no particular reason - has inspired a list of jokes on religious and philosophical views referred to as the 'Shit List'. Disseminated widely on the Internet, the 'Shit List' translates various religious views accordingly (e.g. 7th Day Adventism: Shit happens on Saturdays.) The origin or earliest use of the phrase is uncertain. In a review of a book of quotations, The New Yorker critic Louis Menand observed that it was "extremely interesting to know, for instance, that the phrase 'Shit happens' was introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as UNC–CH Slang (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983. In 1988, a man was charged with obscenity for displaying a bumper sticker with the phrase.