The Oregon Coast Council for the Arts presents “You’d Think it Were Sunny Series,” an exhibition of oil and spray paint works on canvas by North Bend artist Becky Eddy Phillips, from February 2 to March 31 in the Runyan Gallery at the Newport Visual Arts Center.
Becky Eddy Phillips and her family relocated to the Oregon coast from Texas in 2016. Her new body of work is a direct result of being in a new environment and her visual response to a new climate. She calls the exhibition a culmination of her perception of Coastal Oregon and its reception of her.
“’You’d Think it Were Sunny Series’ is a physiological response to weather patterns, organic structure and color,” says Phillips. “It’s also about the inclination to have art on our walls that reflects what is missing in our lives, and, in this case, sunshine.”
Becky Eddy Phillips’ paintings are colorful, bright and fun, and they are filled with yellows, bold organic marks and patterns. The series began as a response to season of record high rainfall with long grey days. “Flickering through the dense gray fog are the neon lights of the city,” Phillips writes in her artist’s statement. “Happiness from the playful paintings is the desired effect.”
In moving to the Oregon coast, Becky Eddy Phillips brings with her an extensive exhibition, curatorial and academic record. She earned her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from West Virginia University, and she is currently an adjunct faculty member in the fine art department at Southwestern Oregon Community College and at the visual and performing arts department at Blinn College in Bryan, Texas. She is the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund in New York City, a West Virginia Culture and History Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Puffin Foundation in New Jersey, and an MFA graduate full tuition waiver and merit scholarship. She has exhibited at many institutions including The Kinsey Institute, The Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago), The Texas National, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Garfield Art Works (Pittsburgh), Visual Arts Alliance (Houston), SEAD Gallery (Bryan), Forsyth Gallery (Texas A&M), The University of Science and Art (Oklahoma) and the Coos Art Museum. In the fall of 2017, she had a solo exhibit at The Fort Worth Community Art Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
“My art wavers in leaps and falls between the introspective and intellectual realms, with dialogues in science, domesticity and feminism,” Phillips writes. “My paintings are a residual effect of creativity and a choice of how to use time. They explore common themes of science and the personal, and also address formal visual elements of color, organic structure and a combination of observation and imagination.”
In conjunction with the “You’d Think It Would Be Sunny Series,”in the Runyan Gallery, Becky Eddy Phillips will be showing a video from her “A False Sense of History Indeed” series in the VAC’s Media Room. The video examines how, in a world of discarded objects, the artist kept her personal art objects through many years and various moves.
The Runyan Gallery is open Tuesday-Sunday, 11am to 5pm. The Media Room is open Tuesday-Saturday, noon to 4pm.