Neon Artist Rosalie Phillips Depicts Everyday People with 'Still Life'

Her debut exhibition will be on display at River Press through August 2.

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Her Story

Riverwest art gallery River Press (2351 N. Humboldt Blvd.) opened its current installation Still Life by artist Rosalie “Rosie” Phillips on May 7, showcasing miniature neon works of people living as a community while wrapped in their daily races. Still Life is Phillips’ debut exhibition and will be on display through August 2. “I’m very grateful to Mya Giuliani as well as this place for giving people like me the chance to have an exhibition,” Phillips says.

With Still Life, Phillips hand-bent neon figures over open flame without using patterns, giving each its own unique expression of color and pose. For example, one figure is smoking a cigarette in its unit while that figure’s next-door neighbor appears to have just moved in. The figure below the new tenant is watching TV and the next figure under that one is doing yoga. Phillips designed the props accompanying the figures via 3D printing, noting, “It adds a surprising amount of emotion to give them one little thing in their world.” She named the exhibition to reflect it being a frozen snapshot into everyone’s lives.

“I often journal with pictures instead of words," Phillips explains. “I started pushing that from 2D to 3D by working on more sculptural pieces instead of traditional flat neon pieces. Almost immediately, I had this idea to make essentially an apartment building of all these people living their own lives where they are separate but in community with each other.”

Phillips’ vision for the installation draws on her own experience of having moved to Milwaukee without knowing anyone prior while living in an apartment building that housed hundreds of other people. “That’s where some of this came from, and marinating on my own feelings and emotions and experiences but also of the feeling of isolation living in a new city.”

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Art and Science

Originally from Cleveland, Phillips studied engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before moving to Milwaukee in 2021 once she accepted a job as an engineer with Milwaukee Tool. Shortly after college, Phillips spent a week in California studying the art of neon under glass artist Juan Ortega, better known as The Neon Guy.  “I was looking for a class to take in some kind of craft, and I had two people in one day tell me that they had always wondered how neon signs were made,” she remembers. “I took that course not necessarily knowing if I would be in love with it, but I left being absolutely obsessed with it.”

Phillips loves working with neon because she gets to combine her two loves of art and science. “There’s the artistic expression of making the glass, but also when it comes to filling them with gas and cleaning them out, that is straight chemistry and electrical engineering, plus I get to mix in some of the design and mechanical engineering aspects throughout it.”

Upon arriving in Milwaukee, Phillips began renting a studio in Milwaukee Makerspace, where she also leads neon-bending workshops. River Press happens to display one of Phillips’ neon signs in its window. “Besides just having a glow, neon has a sound and an aura,” she notes. “You don’t get that with LED, which has a light and dark side, whereas with neon you are casting so much light behind the glass as well as in front of it that it really fills a room.”

Phillips’ art practice Neon Signs from the Universe houses all her studio, commercial and commission-based work. Last year she won third place in the Glass Arts Festival hosted at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah.