Excerpt from Just Kick It Till It Breaks, The Kithchen, catalogue essay by Deb Singer Engaging art historical, design, and mass media references, Michael Phelan's works recontextualize mundane icons of consumer culture to explore how ersatz versions of non-Western aesthetics and practices have become associated with certain "lifestyling" values in contemporary American culture. For The Best Way Out Is Through (2007), a series of tie-dye "paintings", Phelan created large-scale "target" designs of multicolored concentric circles, referencing the format of high modernist works by Kenneth Noland or Jasper Johns as well as the lyrical hues of Color Field painters like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. At the same time, the tie-dye fabrication alludes to how folk art traditions, like the centuries-old production of batik in Central Asia, have been appropriated and recycled for a popular American sensibility. Tie-dye has an especially active lineage: a signifier of peace, love, and protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, it has more recently been repurposed again in mainstream fashion. Phelan's "paintings" once more reiterate a formal vernacular, alluding to a post-ideological condition of global culture in which signs have been "emptied" of their original historical contexts, cancelled out by a conflation of reference points through mass-marketing and assimilation. Similarly, Phelan's flag sculptures reconfigure silk banners emblazoned with imagery from 1960s and '70s rock bands, such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Bob Marley. Typically found in head shops, ... these banners are generally purchased by contemporary suburban teenagers whose relationship to the music's origins and its related symbolism is tenuous at best, replaced by the allure of pot-smoking rebellion. ... Neither fully functional nor obviously decorative, these objects are "misplaced props," that become "quasi-monumental" in a gallery setting. Like the tie-dye target paintings, Phelan's flag sculptures question how cultural traditions, once unhinged from their original contexts, can be reconstituted, redistributed, and seamlessly re-absorbed into the American consumer landscape.   Michael Phelan, artUS by Gean Moreno When Philippe Sollers was done suffering the Calvary of radical écriture, he willed himself into a sort of French Philip Roth. His supporters must have been baffled by the move, though more cynical ones may have gotten the joke. I imagine Sollers these days to be like the slightly corrupt and jet-setting intellectuals featured in his bestsellers, idling away in Venetian villas and caught up in slightly ludicrous schemes, like writing saleable novels or peddling stolen paintings—aware of how ridiculous their situation is but also certain there is no alternative. They could still believe if there was something to believe in. Their faithlessness is a matter of circumstance and not of character. The times allow them nothing else. Behind Michael Phelan's work I think I can catch a glimmer of this Sollersian hero, someone at once knowing but disenchanted, faithless but aching to believe. Sollers's protagonists, as I imagine them, could still take up politics if that were possible in a world where the power of the bottom line didn't put everything through the grinder of general equivalency. Everything is worth exactly its exchange value, and nothing else. Phelan, as I imagine him, could make art—earnest art in the mold of hard boiled American modernists—in a world where art was more than a penthouse-bound luxury good. He could, if the times allowed it, still believe. But for now, he has to put everything in quotation marks, load up on irony, connect the referential dots, and make his own the dandy's principal strategy—the appeal of the least possible labor to the greatest possible effect. For "If today was perfect, there would be no need for tomorrow" in Geneva, Texan-born Phelan showed up with four tie-dye paintings and a couple of sculptures. The psychedelic reference and craft technique not-withstanding, these paintings feel light years away from the neo-hippyism that has been running rampant and unchecked in New York for much too long. Phelan seems to have been spared that strain of archival fever that has his peers unreflexively plundering their parents' countercultural past. These paintings feel too knowing on that. On the one hand, they load up on current déclassé referents, though of course always keeping them in quotation marks. They bring to mind little Wal-Mart towns where mainstream fads go on to become traditional American garb. They allude to the Albuquerque modernism of feather-clad dream catchers and faux Native American rugs. They want to address the American landscape and must, therefore, tap the heartland's blue-collar vernaculars. On the other hand, these paintings are steeped in art historical allusions. They negotiate with the medium as if it were dead language, and have fun with its mummified parts. They're like Neo-Geo with the last bit of faith in historical validity drained out of it. The unprimed canvas tunnels us right to Helen Frankenthaler. The seeped dye is doing a homey version of Morris Louis pours. The tondos place us in the vicinity of Kenneth Noland's seminal paintings, even if the tie-dye's charmed imperfections give us a girlie's version of them. Phelan is splitting the difference between a kitschification of American muscular abstraction and a tweaked homage to it. He's having it both ways, doing Painting and "painting". Like I said, faithless but aching to believe.   Michael Phelan, Excerpt from Abstract America: New Painting From The U.S., The Saatchi Gallery, catalogue essay by Jasper Morrison Huge, wall-sized sheets of linen are stained with concentric rings of blazing colour. The technique is immediately recognizable: tie-dye, an ancient Eastern process of textile design appropriated by the American counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s as a by-word for peace, freedom and protest against the Vietnam War, which has long since entered the western world's fashion mainstream. Its use here as a form of artistic expression is a very deliberate choice on the part of the artist, as too is the scale and palette of the various untitled works. The paintings are as American as Bugs Bunny and pecan pie, open plains on which past meets present to paint a new American landscape; the Manifest Destiny tailored to a modernist sensibility. Stretched and framed, they represent something of an anomaly. Walking the line between high and low art, mass production and hand-made craft, the works knowingly reference several of America's most iconic visual images. The considerable size of the works is rooted in the Abstract Expressionist heroism of Jackson Pollock, Barrnett Newman, and those that followed them, while their palette abandons the acidic psychedelia traditionally associated with tie-dye imagery in favour of the lyrical hues reminiscent of Colour Field artists such as Morrris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Continuing the experiments begun by Turner, Kandsinsky and Albers, this latter group was interested in the atmospheric effects of colour, enveloping the viewer in an impersonal and unashamedly two-dimensional environment on a monumental scale. The dominant motif in each of Phelan's works, a target, is similarly borrrowed from the Color Field lexicon, specifically the paintings made by Noland between 1958-62. They were not intended to be read as targets per se, unlike those that Jasper Johns was producing at around the same time. Rather, the target functioned as it had several decades earlier in the work of Robert Delaunay: as a purely formal device, devoid of narrative or overtly personal expression and well suited to the artist's investigations into abstraction. Aligning the colours in dense rings serves to concentrate their effects and intensify their relationships. Some recede quietly while others advance, pulsating with life. The process by which the works are created is of less importance than the choice of their colours, which is made by the artist with the aid of a computerised pantone. When this has been done, the physical act of production is entrusted to a specialized workshop in the artist's home state of Texas. Chance of course plays its part, dictating the way in which different dyes will react and determining the extent of irregularity in the the staining at the rings' edges.         Selected Works Bio Text Selected Solo Exhibitions Selected Group Exhibitions Contact More...