The best way out is through by Michael Phelan

“Engaging Art History, Design, and Mass Media references, Michael Phelan’s works recontextualize mundane Icons of consumer culture to explore how ersatz versions of non-Western aesthetics and practices have become associated with certain ‘lifestyling’ values in Contemporary American Culture.

For The Best Way Out Is Through, a series of tie-dye paintings, Phelan created large-scale ‘Target’ designs of multicolored concentric circles, referencing the format of high modernist works by ‘Kenneth Noland’ or ‘Jasper Johns’ as well as the lyrical hues of Color Field painters like ‘Morris Louis’ and ‘Helen Frankenthaler’.

At the same time, the tie-dye fabrication alludes to how folk art traditions, like the centuries-old production of batik in Central Asia, have been appropriated and recycled for a Popular American sensibility. Tie-dye has an especially active lineage: a signifier of Peace, Love, and Protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, it has more recently been repurposed again in mainstream fashion.

Phelan’s paintings once more reiterate a formal vernacular, alluding to a post-ideological condition of global culture in which signs have been “emptied” of their original historical contexts, cancelled out by a conflation of reference points through mass-marketing and assimilation.”
—Essay by Chief Curator Debra Singer