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Richard Phillips (b. 1962, Marblehead, MA) lives and works in New York. Adapting his smooth, pop-inflected painterly engagement with celebrities and other commodities that might be considered iconic of present-day desire, Phillips, here, responds to the controversial reception of his “Playboy Marfa” sculpture (a 12-meter neon bunny commissioned by its namesake publisher) that was installed alongside Texas’s Highway 90 in 2013 until deemed illegal and taken down. With “Canyons II,” Phillips revisits the playboy logo super-imposing it onto an impressionist interpretation of the Mexican serape rug. Once seen as a pure art form and a symbol of Mexican cultural wealth, these rugs now more often taken to be tourist items or connote the “drug rugs” made popular by surf culture. In this print, Phillips plays with “heritage” décor as it relates to the accelerated hoarding of property and wealth associated with art and gentrification in west Texas.
