RAIR | 2009-10

Larry Bob Phillips | Albuquerque, NM

Larry Bob Phillips, born near Amarillo, Texas, in 1973, studied with calligrapher Carl Kurtz at the Kansas City Art Institute in the early 1990s. While receiving his MFA from the University of New Mexico in the early 2000s, he helped start and run the Donkey Gallery in Albuquerque. Larry Bob taught at the University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College for seven years. He has exhibited widely and keeps up a vigorous mural schedule. He recently completed his second mural for Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.

At the end of 2018 Phillips stepped in as the new RAiR program director.

http://larrybobphillips.com

Under normal circumstances my studio looks like a regular drawing studio, pencil and ink drawings on standard size papers. However, with extra time and space granted to me by the RAiR Program, I began to envision a drawing that would completely envelop the gallery and by its scale and complexity reorient the viewer outside of the traditional window/frame/picture plane. With about six months left in my residency, I started from scratch on the walls of Butterfly Trigger, using new approaches and new materials. To reinforce the cartoon logic of the monumental landscapes, I decided to build a life-size Econo-SUV and render its surface with a trompe l’oeil graphics. The combination of these elements help me create a space, where expansive scale literalizes the images so that painting considerations become architectural, experiential and time-based. The scale of the wall drawings and the sculpture were both firsts for me, but with the generous allotment of time and space in the RAiR Program I had the invaluable opportunity to create this work.

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition • Larry Bob Phillips “Butterfly Trigger" • August 7 - September, 26, 2010