Skirting the Line: Conceptual Drawing, Erotic drawings, Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art, Neoqueer, Living Inside the Grid, Walking Rhetorics, Special Needs, Inventory - when the titles are listed for the group exhibitions that Danica Phelps has taken part in since about 2000, then a horizon immediately opens up against which the New York artist's work asks to be read in the context of a rekindled interest in drawing as a medium. At the same time, her meticulous, intimate research in the field of a minimalist line links up with predecessors like Dadamaino, Jan J. Schoonhoven, Hanne Darboven, Marcia Hafif or Agnes Martin in the 1960s to 70s.
Danica Phelps's practice involves assiduously cataloging her daily expenditure and every-day activities over designated blocks of time. since 1996 she has developed an elaborate diagrammatic system to record and identify every single financial transaction - where each dollar is represented visually by a single stripe of watercolor: green for incomings, red for outgoings and grey or orange for credit. In her work October 2-8, 2005, which consists solely of red and green stripes, she is summing up a week. The corresponding calculation is marked down in the bottom right-hand corner, and tallies with the number of green and red stripes in the picture itself. Through a combined installation of intricate week-at-a-glance financial charts and point by point daily diaries with complementary figurative line drawings, Phelps creates a sensitive, systemic documentation of life's repetitious rituals such as taking a shower, making love, grocery shopping, paying her utility bills or daily encounters with friends. At the same time, she has used this methodology as a basis to actively address her role as an artist and the tenets of inimitability, creative value and exchange within the art market. This has seen her repeatedly tracing and regenerating her sold drawings and then re-selling them as generational facsimiles or trading her work with other artists and writers in exchange for examples of their work. Though Phelps asked selected writers, poets and critics to write a text on a subject inspired by a drawing of their choosing in exchange for the drawing itself. The writers' responses have been reproduced in their entirety alongside their drawings within the new publication, "Every Day Life". If one remembers the above-mentioned predecessors again, from Dadamaino to Max Cole, then both what connects and what divides is typical of Danica Phelps's position: she is linked by an approach, combining abstraction, contemplation, conceptual systematics and individual scenography. What separates her from them is her challenging emphasis on dailiness, a tendency to be exhibitionistic and offensive. When it can be said that artists such as Opalka, On Kawara, Hafif always take a turn towards the philosophically existential on their way through the chronology of the everyday and the temporal, Danica Phelps exposes herself to the questionable qualities revealed on closer examination by the prescribed patterns of morality, value and quality.