Danica Phelps

„I have been making work about money and my everyday life since I received my MFA from RISD in 1995.  I have been concerned with value since then when I began working as a waitress after leaving graduate school and for the following three years.  What is my time worth?  How much is a dollar really worth?  Is $20 worth more to me if I only have $100?  I started drawing everything I spent money on as a way to keep track of how much money that I had at any given moment.  I was living in an SRO in Manhattan with so little money that I was constantly running out.  Making drawings of everything I spent money on helped me keep track of how much money I had, but also helped me feel that I was generating something every time I spent it.  When I started showing my work (my first group show was at White Columns in 1998) and found that people were interested in buying it, I realized that I had to devise a plan for how to let the drawings go and still keep something to maintain my records since every drawing was part of a system.

I decided to trace each drawing that was sold and add information on the tracing about who purchased the drawing, how much they paid for it, how much I earned when they bought it and where.  I then mounted the tracings to wood and added them back into the system.  At this point, anyone else could purchase the drawing, and so on up to the 20th generation.“ – Danica Phelps