Lauren Philips Solo Exhibit Save Your Self

Lauren Phillips is an artist based in Kansas City. Her work reflects a combination of her interests: the female experience, bringing awareness to social inequities, mental health, the natural world, joy, and pleasures.

By pairing very approachable and relatable imagery with challenging ideas or complicated feelings, much of her work encourages the viewer to embrace new thinking and complex emotions. She balances this with other works that are about pleasure and celebration.
She frequently works with wood cutouts, acrylic paintings, and digital illustration. She has experience with large-scale paintings, sculptures, and tiles.

“We’ve been sold the idea that all of the answers to our questions and any emptiness inside ourselves can be fulfilled with a purchase. There are many legitimate uses for medications, but pharmaceutical companies and advertisers want us to believe that the solutions to all our problems come in bright packages and capsules.

I’ve taken the saturated, plastic colors, shapes, and graphics that advertisers entice us with and used them to show what is missing from consumerism. My products are cut out of wood panels and painted; this flattens them so that the object exists, but only as a façade, similar to a theater set, and similar to the American dream.
I use familiar objects and imagery to make questioning a system or processing emotions feel comfortable, natural, and approachable.”