"Child of Our Era" Sculpture

Benjamin Phillips is a mid-career American-Canadian sculptor based in Ottawa, Ontario. His art practice primarily focuses on portraying the human body with a style that intersects Classical form with contemporary themes relating to vulnerability, embodiment and change. Phillips has worked to develop his own humanizing aesthetic that demonstrates a keen observer's intuition on the human condition. His figurative compositions foretell uncertain futures, frozen in moments of honest fragility that endow his compositions with a natural and arresting effect. His works arouse compassion, curiosity and reflection through their stripped-down and seemingly simple format. With any time spent with them, however, Phillips' sculptures quietly reveal layers of complexity and personal insights, like people. Trained originally in classical bronze statuary, Phillips works to subvert conventional expectations with figurative art into powerful statements of vulnerability and struggle. Raised in rural Nova Scotia, Phillips graduated from Acadia University (BA), the University of Victoria (BFA) and Arizona State University (MFA), he is a two-time winner of the international Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation artist grant and three-time winner of the National Sculptor's Society scholarship (USA), both for representational art. Phillips has exhibited locally and internationally in Canada and the United States, most recently showing at Udinotti Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. Notable artist residencies include the Corporation of Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center and the Ottawa School of Art.