The Beach Boys
January 18 – February 24, 2024

Phil Davis

I hope someone somewhere is being kind to my boy.

A group of alcoholics sitting around at a bar talking about spiders.

Suddenly the hospital is quiet.

Suddenly the hospital is quiet.
The silence surrounds a particular shape.

I know this shape every time it comes around.

I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me
Or why I feel the need to listen to it.

But I know when it’s there, no two ways about it.

It’s the backside of Forest Lawn cemetery.

It’s a dusty Japanese restaurant.

It’s a child actor overheating on set
with the smell of pine needles in the summer.

It’s the term “flying carpet”
It’s the two-bedroom,
cobwebbed and cigarettey in the daylight
where he lives with his two boys.
The real ivory tower.

NEW YORK, NY - Shoot the Lobster is pleased to present Phil Davis: The Beach Boys, the artist’s first solo show in New York on view from January 18 to February 24, 2024.

Davis is interested in theater – both in the literal sense, and in daily life. In performance and in painting, he seeks the lowest common denominator of representation: the critical accumulation of gesture and line necessary to convey the complexities of an identity.

Source material for Davis has ranged from Halloween costume catalogs, teen horror films, children’s books about the Medieval era, to love songs. His works emerge in the space between the signified and the signifier - the inevitable disconnect between the archetype being represented and limits of the medium used to represent it. In costumes, complex histories and identities are reduced to cheap simulacra: a plastic centurion helmet and sword for the Roman Soldier, fitted polyester scrubs and a nonfunctional stethoscope for the Nurse, oversized, lens-less glasses and suspenders for the Nerd. Like these costumes, Davis’s paintings exist in a reality that is implied rather than experienced.

In this latest body of work, Davis starts with the cover art for the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds as the original reference image: the five members of the group captured in a semi-candid moment, stiffly feeding goats in a petting zoo. The image became “burned into my skull,” explains Davis. “The experience of recalling the image is reflected in the way the painting is made; it is emblematic of chasing an image or memory instead of fully realizing it. This sensation is also a symptom of the same economy - If the paintings were ‘fully’ rendered they would just be pictures, not paintings.”

Phil Davis (b. 1988, Pasadena, CA) received a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012. His recent exhibitions include Love Songs at Phil Gallery, LA (solo); MTV2 at Night Gallery, LA (solo); Pipe Dream at Rachel Uffner, NY (group); and Gauzy at In Lieu (group), LA, among others. In 2015, he ran Blood Gallery in Brooklyn, NY with Philippe de Sablet and Lydia Glenn-Murray, and most recently organized an exhibition along the Lower Arroyo Seco trail in Pasadena, CA in February, 2023, covered by ARTFORUM. He has an upcoming solo show at Fernberger, Los Angeles in 2024.

Phil Davis by Mona Welch