Kerry Phillips: The Universal meets the Time-Worn at LnS Gallery

Kerry Phillips repurposes the familiar in Coconut Grove at LnS Gallery in “Coincidence of Sound. Above, the work “Coincidence of Sound,” 2025, found and collected objects, 124 x 522 inches. (Photo courtesy Rogelio López Marín (Gory))

Miami-based artist Kerry Phillips continues her remarkable exhibition streak with “Coincidence of Sound,” now on view at LnS Gallery in Coconut Grove. Following 2023’s “Between the Mundane and the Miraculous” at The Bass Museum and “The Patience of Ordinary Things at Locust Projects” the year prior, Phillips hits another one out of the park.  Each exhibition has been wholly distinct, yet unmistakably hers—an evolving, tactile investigation into the overlooked materials and forgotten textures of American domestic life.

Rather than relying on obvious visual tropes like flags or vintage ephemera, Phillips explores Americana through a more oblique, emotionally resonant lens: weathered textures, dated patterns, and the colors of memory. Her aesthetic is deeply personal and oddly universal, bypassing nostalgia in favor of a subtler emotional archaeology.

LnS Gallery, founded in 2017 by Luisa Lignarolo and helmed by longtime Miami arts figure Sergio Cernuda (formerly of Cernuda Arte), has become an essential venue for presenting thorough, contextually rich exhibitions. As the gallery states, its mission is to “invite open dialogue through a program of thematically relevant exhibitions… unbound in a universal perspective.” “Coincidence of Sound” exemplifies this ethos.

“There is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean,” 2025. Carpet, fabric, wooden dowels on stretched canvas, 59 ¾ x 64 inches. (Photo courtesy Rogelio López Marín (Gory))

The exhibition’s anchor is a monumental, site-specific installation in the back corner of the gallery, titled “Coincidence of Sound,” which occupies three walls in a rhythmic, horizon-like sprawl. Comprised of a patchwork of reclaimed household materials arranged by size, the piece evokes Louise Nevelson’s formal density while remaining rooted in Phillips’ own visual language. Unlike Nevelson, who often monochromed her works, Phillips retains the inherent colors, dents, and textures of her materials—plastic, aluminum, wood, fabric—each imbued with its own lived history.

A larger assemblage is a journey into the past, into a time of folding card tables during summer nights, the tongs of a rake in the yard, chair seats, and couch pillows from the 1960s and 70s. It was a time of TV tables and crushed gold velvet, of post-war aspirations for comfort and ease. The elements used in this large work, plastic, wood, aluminum, seem to originate from a purposeful yet mysterious “machine” sitting on the floor, around the corner.  Constructed from rusted metal boxes of unknown utilitarian origin, it evokes something found in a long-abandoned factory in a city once known for industry. Nuances of Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel” or “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),” made just over 100 years ago, slide through the works, but unobtrusively.

Found here is the assisted Readymade, pickled in memory.

“Tonta (Shadow of My Shadow),” 2025. Carpet on Felt, 22 ¼ x 31 ¼ inches. (Photo courtesy (Photo courtesy Rogelio López Marín (Gory))

Throughout the show, Phillips constructs a flickering tension between Minimalist detachment and sentimental materiality. Her use of the grid—a formal device associated with Minimalism’s refusal of illusion—is constant, yet emotionally porous.  Sculptures shimmer between the cold purity of geometric abstraction and the warm tactility of personal memory. The result is neither Minimalism nor memoir, but something in between: an emotional architecture of recollection.

Phillips’ exhibition titles tend toward the thoughtful and well-crafted. What does the title “Coincidence of Sound” signify? After all, both sound and color possess tonal qualities, and texture exists in both media. The synthesis of these elements generates layering, an obsessive constant in Phillips’ work. She draws upon the lyrics from the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” (“Remain in Light,” 1980) for the titles of her artworks and lyrics from the song “Once in a Lifetime.” They include “There is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean,” “Time isn’t Holding Us,” and “Water Dissolving, Water Removing.” These pieces represent the most structurally intricate works within the exhibition. The presentation is impeccable, yet the materials presented are time-worn, flawed, used. Her works resonate structurally with the lyrics she references, which employ multiple layers and sampling, a formerly rare process in music outside of urban culture at that time.

This exhibition also contains “photo-based work,” which may read as slyly ironic. Phillips recreated family snapshots in low-pile carpet. These came from a time pre-Photoshop: to format or crop a photo was outside of the vernacular; filters did not exist.

“First Snowman (Penny, Kerry),” 2025. Carpet on felt, 31 ¼ x 40 ¼ inches
(Photo courtesy Rogelio López Marín (Gory))

A box sits in the middle of the photo. A cat sits in the middle of the box. The photos are blunt, as was customary, enhanced by Phillips’ choice of simplicity of presentation. Through this paring down, the specific elements become universal, the every-mom, the every-snowman, the every-pom pom hat. An iteration of a shadow, Tonta (Shadow of my Shadow),  further pushes the ungraspability of these works, the elusive quality of memory. A shadow is made textural with the carpet, which spins the idea on its head.  The specific attention to the nuances of shape in each element asserts their authenticity, creating a portrait of time. The works are childlike yet sophisticated in a complex amalgamation.

The “Woven Woods” series binds chair parts, wood slats, and other anonymous detritus. In “Woven Lamps (Sherwood Green, Wheat),” Phillips incorporates fluorescent tubes, perhaps a nod to Dan Flavin, but binds them with richly dyed yarns in deep autumnal hues.

A line from the exhibition’s press release offers a key to understanding her approach: ““Kerry Phillips approaches her practice in two distinct ways: either with a clear initial concept that guides the development of the work, or through a process of pure intuition – allowing materials and instinct to dictate direction without a predetermined outcome.”

“Woven Woods (Peachblow, Coppertone, Poppy),” 2025. Found and kept wood, yarn, 34 x 23 ¾ inches. (Photo courtesy Rogelio López Marín (Gory))

Phillips is a process-oriented artist who closely listens to her materials and utilizes intuition in connection with their numen. Each piece is a discovery, a broad invitation to plumb one’s mind for why it all seems so familiar yet without easy talking points. To discuss these works is an exercise in communication, as they can’t be pigeonholed. One’s memories may have been shared with another, but each interpretation is singular, or, as the Talking Heads put it in their song “Psycho Killer,” “You’re talking a lot but you’re not saying anything.”

In the end, these works do not tell you what to feel. They withhold as much as they reveal. Their power lies in their capacity to evoke rather than explain. Oftentimes, contemporary art doesn’t follow the “show, don’t tell” idea from literature as the reliance on text over simplifies, the process of interpretation becomes spoon-fed.

Viewers are invited to recognize themselves in Phillips’ and employ their own experience. Through a rigorous but open practice, material yet metaphysical, aloof yet warm, Phillips has created a language of her own, one that is grounded in repurposing, haunted by the mass-produced, and always, always in dialogue with memory. This is Phillips’ great generosity: the works are not about her; they are about us.

WHAT: “Kerry Phillips: Coincidence of Sound”

WHERE: LnS Gallery, 2610 SW 28th Lane, Miami

WHEN: Opened Friday, June 6, and will run through the summer, with a closing date TBA

COST: Free

INFO: (305) 586-0252 or lnsgallery.com

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