FERNBERGER

The paintings are made the same way a television show is made. Characters are presented as shapes with lines and shadows. What you’re seeing is an outline, a hollow shape. The true life of each character is impossible to capture. The spaces are filled in by the viewer and constantly changing.

In the same way I paint values and shadows, I might outline the dark part first. The only thing that separates the light and the dark is one line. It’s in the same way that a costume functions wherein there is a nominal amount articulated in order to communicate something that is vastly more complicated. In the painting it’s a shadow on a man’s knee that is representing something that is constantly in flux by way of light movement, blood flow etc. Whereas the other, the costume is similarly tracing and outlining in the most basic sense something that is impossible to distill. A moment of life, a historical reference, a television show of child actors overheating in the sun while shooting an 1870’s drama in Simi Valley for 10 years.

The paintings occupy a place between a place. They exist between the memory of imagery absorbed from media and the consequence of that absorption.

–Phil Davis, 2025

For his second solo exhibition at Fernberger, Phil Davis draws inspiration from the 1970s television series “Little House on the Prairie”, based loosely on the series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The exhibition, entitled “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away” borrows its name from the television show, specifically the finale of the fourth season.

Imagery from this series has filtered into the artist’s practice for nearly a decade, as evidenced by earlier works on paper included in the exhibition, and serves as the sole source material for the imagery in this show. However, in a grander sense, the source material is somewhat arbitrary. Having grown up in Pasadena, Hollywood-adjacent, Davis’s work is concerned with theatricality to an extent–the ways in which costume or a gesture can communicate an entire persona. The images he chooses to represent are chosen more for their evocative nature than anything else. Rendered in paint, as if from memory, the images become vessels for the imagination and take on an expanded, alternate resonance, recording different intervals of nostalgia and media transactions. In this show, for example, there are 2025 paintings of 2017 screenshots of a 1978 television show about a book written in the 1930s about life in America in the 1870s.

“I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away” consists of new paintings, a video installation, a sculpture, as well as a selection of works on paper from the artist’s archive. The video contains footage from “Little House on the Prairie” the television series, as well as reproductions of a community theater dramatization of the books spliced together with the artist’s original footage.

Phil Davis (b. 1988, Pasadena, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012. His works have been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions at Shoot the Lobster, New York; Mountain View Mausoleum, Altadena; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Rachel Uffner, New York; Lower Arroyo Seco Trail, Pasadena; Nara, Japan; and Amager Strandpark, Copenhagen, Denmark, among others.

Phil Davis (b. 1988, Pasadena, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012. His works have been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions at Shoot the Lobster, New York; Mountain View Mausoleum, Altadena; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Rachel Uffner, New York; Lower Arroyo Seco Trail, Pasadena; Nara, Japan; and Amager Strandpark, Copenhagen, Denmark, among others.