Kana Philip 'Irreversible Presence'

October 7-28

Irreversible Presence presents a series of paintings where the everyday becomes a vessel for time’s slow passing. A sandwich assembled, groceries carried through an empty car park, hands slicing meat on a board. These gestures appear banal at first, yet they resonate as markers of duration, intimacy, and mortality.

Philip’s works turn to what he calls “soft transgressions,” the slight breakdowns in the fabric of domestic life. A hand hovers close to the knife’s edge. A face is obscured by a violet mask. A sealed bag offers both protection and concealment. A couch sits occupied only by its impression, the absent figure marked through what is left behind. These are not grand ruptures but small reversals, moments where the familiar becomes charged with uncertainty.

The paintings lean into stillness and restraint, not spectacle. They attend to the subtle ways time inscribes itself upon the body, the household, and the gestures that repeat across a life. In these measured scenes, mortality is not named but implied, traced through the ordinary acts that accumulate without fanfare.

Each painting stages a moment of irreversible presence. Once performed, it cannot be undone. In their accumulation, these scenes suggest that domestic rituals and quotidian tasks are not escapes from time, but its most faithful record.

Artist Statement

My work centres on the human experience of impermanence, not as a distant concept, but as something intimate and felt: the flutter of ephemerality, the quiet instability beneath what seems continuous, the tenderness and terror of knowing things won't last.

I am drawn to refuges of authentic connection: moments of unguarded presence in solitary absorption, in domestic rituals, in the spaces between intended actions. Dogs, daily patterns, the quiet choreography of ordinary life become vessels of time, measurements of our passage through days and years.

Certain motifs emerge from this exploration: a pattern that migrates between compositions, figures whose gestures echo across separate canvases, and domestic rhythms that repeat with subtle variations. These elements function like visual memory, creating continuities that acknowledge both persistence and change. Rather than explaining impermanence, the work creates suspended moments where viewers sense the same paradox: how gestures repeated become poignant, how ordinary rituals turn profound, how fleeting moments feel most tender. In these pauses between the intended and the observed, presence and loss exist simultaneously.

Artist Bio

Born in the Midwest and raised in a working-class Vermont town, Kana Philip left home as a teenager after his father was killed by a drunk driver. He spent the next decade on different edges of New York City: working construction jobs, roadieing for underground bands, living in squats, and riding as a bike messenger. For a time, he lived in a gang-run squat, surrounded by guns and violence. He was not part of that world, but existed as a harmless outsider among people who, despite everything, often treated him with kindness. Those were formative years shaped by physicality, contradiction, and an intimate proximity to violence, loyalty, and survival.

A chance encounter led him to a drawing class and eventually to the School of Visual Arts, where he earned his BFA. He sold paintings after graduation, but was still carrying trauma and did not yet have the clarity to make his intentions legible through the work. The art world felt opaque, and he stepped away. He taught himself design and built a life outside painting. In 2023, he returned to the studio, not to make a comeback, but to make sense of what has endured. The work is slow, observational, and shaped by a belief that the most lasting images often emerge from the margins.