Mother Nature Mother Creature

Mother Nature Mother Creature (2014) is the first book in which the Canadian painter Brad Phillips (b. 1974) presents work made entirely of original photographs, rather than the photo-sourced paintings for which he is best known.

Printed in risograph color by Perish Publishing in Toronto, the 84-page paperback follows two tattooed women as they undress, walk through a West Coast Canadian forest, and dress again. In a wry nod to the "naturalism" invoked by fashion editorials and vintage pornography alike, Phillips stages the nude body outdoors and lets the sequence sit with an idea he traces to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: that the naked body is sexual only a fraction of the time. The images read like outtakes from a cult photo album - casual and unglamorous, quietly at odds with the genres they borrow from.

Phillips lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles and New York. His paintings, drawn from his own snapshots, mine intimacy, addiction, and desire with equal parts vulnerability and dark humor Mother Nature Mother Creature extends that same material into a rare stand-alone photographic project, issued in an edition of 200.