Emma Phillips’s forthcoming exhibition at ReadingRoom will shine a light on the breadth of her practice. This will be her first exhibition with ReadingRoom since 2019, amalgamating several projects from the last decade. Phillips explains, “my work is one huge series, a continuation that builds. Like the ‘beach’ pictures from 2016—they are linked to the indoor portraits I make now, which are linked back to ‘dreamscape’ images I made when I started photography.”
Taking over both rooms of ReadingRoom, the exhibition will consist of several iterations, with installed works changed throughout the exhibition period. The first iteration will incorporate approximately 50 risograph printed snapshots from the summer of 2015-2016 and drawings, a new medium for Phillips that she employs, here, photographically. The instantaneousness of her drawings can be likened to the immediacy of the snapshot. The show also includes large-scale silver gelatin prints of landscapes, portraits of Phillips’s friend Charlie, originally taken for a PHOTO / Metro Tunnel commission and works that engage the artist’s extensive polaroid collection.
The works will celebrate Phillips’s knack for catching moments of unbridled humanity, showing a deep respect for sitter and landscape while considering the functions, failures and possibilities of photography. As Phillips explains, “I like showing pictures that are aesthetically ubiquitous, too common, failed, under or overexposed. I’m not interested in making the perfect print.” It is this openness that allows Phillips to collapse and expand the ways we can ‘see’ a photograph.
This time last year (how to make a picture)
Emma Phillips
ReadingRoom
9 November—7 December
This article was originally published in the November/December 2024 print issue of Art Guide Australia.
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