true to size
32ª Bienal de São Paulo

source: vimeo
TRUE TO SIZE is presented as even installations across Plymouth Arts Centre’s galleries. While each has its own theme, they are very much episodes – or vignettes – within an overarching narrative. Composed of oversized cardboard cut-out emoji’s, life sized teddy bears, and video monitors grafted onto the teddy bears, occasional other objects traverse the border between the emoji world of TRUE TO SIZE and the spaces of our own lives.
Using emoji’s as the found imagery from which the scenarios are built up, each alludes to archetypes of contemporary experience and the crisis they present for our bodies, including death and the afterlife, desire, climate change, natural disasters, self-mutilation, body hygiene and fitness regimes. Phillipson’s combinations of images already push the emoji’s into surreal montages that undermines their innocuous innocence. But it is when the sculptural, video and spoken images combine that they start to resolve into some kind of narrative that twists the veneer of cutesiness and seeks out the darker recesses of our minds.
TRUE TO SIZE, 2016, by Heather Phillipson is a 70th anniversary commission for the Arts Council Collection. Founded in 1946, the ACC is the largest national loan collection of modern and contemporary British art and includes important examples by all of the UK’s prominent artists.
Heather Phillipson (born 1978) lives in London. Phillipson’s solo shows in 2016 include Whitechapel Gallery London, Images Festival Toronto, Schirn Frankfurt, Frieze Projects New York and the 32nd São Paulo Biennial.
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source: frieze
artist and poet Heather Phillipson (b. 1978, London, UK. Lives and works in London, UK) composes a new multimedia work interspersed throughout the fair, which incorporates repeated sculptural motifs that interplay with video, audio and text. For this project, Phillipson imagines the structure of the fair as a giant, chopped-up human spinal cord beseiged by mutated dogs and screens, describing the intersecting bodies as ‘a clash of nervous systems – dismembered, dissected and flung down on Randall’s Island.’

Heather Phillipson has recently held solo shows at Schirn, Frankfurt; Performa, New York; 14th Istanbul Biennial; Sheffield Doc/Fest (all 2015), the Serpentine Gallery, London; Dundee Contemporary Arts (2014), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2013). Forthcoming solo shows include the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Images Festival, Toronto and the 32nd Sao Paolo Biennale (all 2016). Phillipson is also an award-winning poet.