A thing for things

People who can't drive down a street on bulk-pickup day without pulling over may appreciate Sometimes Your Things Are My Things, artist Kerry Phillips' show that opens this weekend at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Phillips may be a pack rat, but wayward buttons, game pieces or plastic Easter eggs could be the missing element needed to complete a great work of art. In the new exhibit, 55 shadowboxes made from cardboard will house hundreds of the treasures she's collected since childhood, including seashells, keys, a wooden block and netted fruit bags.

"I just pick up things on the ground," Phillips explains. "I'm fascinated by them. They're trash, they're junk, they're precious. I mean, they're completely worthless. But once I pick it up, it becomes this thing I have to keep."

The 34-year-old Phillips, who was raised in Texas and now lives in Miami, says she inherited this habit from her parents, who grew up on farms. "My dad was a collector, meaning he couldn't throw anything away, and also Mr. Fix It, so the garage and back yard looked like a junkyard in the making," the artist recalls. "My mom sewed, so there were lots of fabrics and notions. If I needed something, like new clothes for my Barbie or something for my stuffed animals to sleep in, I would rummage around and make it using anything I could find, often substituting something odd."

Readily available fabrics and doodads were like a gateway drug that led Phillips, by the time she was 10, to acquire more things. "I remember trying to start 'collections' but getting bored with the idea of any one thing," she says.

Today, Phillips, who graduated from the University of Arizona with a master's in fine art, incorporates into her artwork odd items from a stockpile that rivals those her parents once had. Phillips says her parents don't understand her art, but get a kick out of hearing what she does with items as seemingly useless as trampoline springs. "My dad bought them somewhere, sometime, but they didn't fit our trampoline so they stayed in the back yard, rusting," Phillips says. "One year, I was visiting and asked, 'Can I have these?' and they're like, 'Um, yeah.' I weaved some weird thing and hung the springs off of it and someone came to my studio and bought it. I was trying to describe this to my parents and they're like, 'What was it again?' So I showed them a picture and my mom was cracking up."

But Phillips' acquisitions began cramping her workspace. So while moving to a new studio a few years ago, she vowed to turn them into art or ditch them. "I realized that these things I'm keeping are more of a hindrance, and I keep them out of a sense of desperation," she says. "Like, how am I ever going to find a garbage bag full of crocheted squares again?

"I adopt these things and graft them into my life, like they're now mine. They're part of me," Phillips continues. "It's like amputating something just to get rid of this key I've held onto forever."

The resulting projects, which Phillips consider part of a larger series titled Things, use found objects to evoke her family history. Things I Kept, Things I'm Keeping, which appeared in several local exhibitions including one at Locust Projects, features jars similar to the ones Phillips' grandmother used for canning fruits and vegetables, but packed with found items and crocheted squares. In Things I Found, Things I Kept Phillips encased her finds in black crochet and chained them together so people could feel the objects but not see them. The online project Fixed Things documents how Phillips uses found objects to repair broken dressers, chairs and umbrellas.

While Phillips has spun many "things" into art, there's no 12-step program for hoarders, and Phillips' summer trips to France and Germany made it impossible to keep collections in Miami. "The first day [in Berlin], I see this red crayon on the ground and bend down to pick it up," she admits. "I was like, 'Yay, a crayon!' … And then, I was like, 'Oh, no! I can't do this again.' I decided to take pictures instead of picking up the object and then having to keep it or get rid of it."

She kept the crayon and returned to South Florida determined to plan her Art and Culture Center show. "I had a big pile for Goodwill and a big pile of things I could maybe [sell]," she says. After visualizing the exhibition, however, she sifted through those piles to extract pieces for the show.

Phillips is now raising funds for a project that will take her to her late paternal grandparents' Texas farm for three months. The house is uninhabitable, so Phillips will camp there with her dog, Tonta, and invite school groups and artists to create work around the objects and the land. She didn't know her paternal grandparents as well as her mother's parents, which is why she is eager to begin the project. "I will get to know the people from what was left behind and remake and re-create some of the history. It would almost feel like I'm homesteading, but it would be really fun to get the garden going again because my grandmother had this amazing garden … like this weird secret garden," Phillips says.

"There's so much crap out there," she adds excitedly. "The place is an endless source of materials. … The last time I talked to my dad about it, he told me the barn had just blown down, and I'm like, 'Wow, that's just this stockpile of old rotted wood. Perfect!'"

Sometimes Your Things Are My Things will open 6-9 p.m. Friday at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, 1650 Harrison St. Call 954-921-3274 or visit Artandculturecenter.org. Contact Colleen Dougher at cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.