Sarah Nicole Phillips
Sarah Nicole Phillips is a Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist. She received her B.A, in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and her MFA from Brooklyn College with a concentration in printmaking. She participated in a year-long artist residency at the Lower East Side Printshop where she taught for eight years. She’s been awarded residencies at The Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska. Sarah exhibits widely in Canada and the US and has been included in shows at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, the International Print Center New York, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). In 2014 she had a solo exhibition at McKinley Arts and Culture Center in Reno, Nevada. She is a 2009 & 2014 recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council grants. She was commissioned by NYC’s Department of Transportation to design a pedestrian barrier in 2016. Her work is in the permanent collections of The James Hotel and NYU Langone Hospital.
I create collages with discarded, patterned security envelopes collected from my own life and the lives of my friends and family. Security envelopes are used to camouflage sensitive and private documents. Their decorative patterns make it impossible to read what is inside. The secrets contained within these envelopes form the dull, bureaucratic infrastructure of contemporary life. I began working with the material when I worked an office job that required me to sort the mail. I noticed the variety of intricate patterns used to line the envelopes and was spurred to create art out of this abundant material that I could divert from the waste stream. My current body of work include traditional office imagery like drop ceilings, cubicles and uninspired lobby décor. These collages represent a fantasy in which the material of the reliable, boring disappointments of life, are transformed into a means of escape.
