Minna Philips

2025 NEW WORK: Focus on Los Angeles Grantee
Exhibition at Winslow Garage – Fall 2025

Minna Philips is a contemporary artist from India, living in Inglewood, California. Her works explore the nature of reality, particularly the higher dimensional theory in physics that proposes the existence of extra dimensions and “branes” that suggest the confinement of our universe on one of the many membranes in higher dimensions. She is also inspired by natural patterns and the in-between nature of her identity as an immigrant. Her architectural drawings explore spaces as they relate to our bodies and perception, highlighting these ideas. Minna's works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are in private and public collections, including the Los Angeles Museum of Art. Her work Memory is part of the Moon Gallery project based in the Netherlands and will eventually find a permanent place on the Moon in 2025.

As part of the NEW WORK: Focus on Los Angeles grant, Minna will present a new installation at Winslow Garage in Fall 2025. Below is her original project proposal, shared to provide insight into her approach and as a resource for future applicants.

PROJECT PROPOSAL

By Minna Philips

The proposed project is inspired by the science fiction short story by Robert Heinlein, called "And He Built a Crooked House". In this story, Heinlein creates an architectural space that we can imagine to be a time traveling machine. This project explores ideas of space-time, connectivity and memory and calls attention to science fiction stories, which often become reality when science is able to catch up to human imagination. The installation will focus on arranging sculptures and drawings loosely based on the layout of a tesseract; which is a cube in a four dimensional space. It will include small and large scale graphite drawings that will hang on walls and wood sculptures painted with graphite that will sit along the floor in carefully selected positions to correspond to the environment around it. This short story allows us to imagine that the space we occupy is connected to unseen far away places and situations. In fact, given the right context and theory, particles and forces can travel through and across branes, which allows for a rethinking of our physics and perception. A perpetual construction and deconstruction of systems in place - which act as a veil that promotes conformism and discourage originality and difference, is how a community, a society and humanity can thrive. This project encourages viewers to find relationships between individual works to observe that reality can be different, depending on the space you occupy and how certain views allow a full picture and others, obscure parts of the whole.