Danica Phelps

Danica Phelps's work reflects conceptual precedents not only in taking economics as her object of work, but also in her very practice of data collection, exhaustiveness, and the recording of facts that have characterized much of her conceptual practice. Since 1996, Danica Phelps has documented all of her income and expenses through her drawings, in a system that progressively grows in lines of work and complexity. In this system, each drawing is a representation of an everyday activity and a documentation of a financial transaction: each dollar is represented by a single watercolor line, green for income, red for expenses, and gray for credit. The result is an immense personal diary, although speaking of the result is complicated, firstly because the work is still a work in progress, and secondly, because the work itself is not so much a work as a trace, a document of fragments of life and everyday life.