Phee Jefferies
You’re Doing It Wrong

PREVIEW: Tuesday1st July | 5:30-8:30pm

The world can be a mundane and underwhelming place, Phee makes things stand out. The monotony of the working week and the things we see so often that we stop noticing them are undone in the hyper-realistic work of Phee Jeffries. 

‘You’re Doing It Wrong’ takes the objects of the everyday and presents them in unexpected ways. These installations give an absurdist view of the world that can be simultaneously humorous and disquieting. 100 years on from the birth of surrealism it is a style still very much in evidence in the ultra-bizarre, you wouldn’t believe it if we told you, 21st Century.

Floor Plan

Does Humour Belong in Art?

Frank Zappa (1940-1993) once posed the question “Does Humour Belong in Music?” (Live in NYC 1983) Zappa was the ultimate musical absurdist; as comfortable performing the works of Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) as singing double, some less generous critics would argue single, entendre laden songs such as ‘Bobby Brown Goes Down’, ‘I have Been In You’ and ‘Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow’. But to discount Zappa as some Noisy Rock & Roll Numb Nuts is to completely miss the point of these two seemingly disparate aspects of his work as a musician. 

Zappa was the ultimate non-conformist; a man who playfully disregarded convention and challenged societal norms, in the process creating doo wop inspired and innuendo filled songs that would be picked up by kids in the school playground, all the while playing concerts of experimental 20th Century Avant-Garde Electronica and Musique Concrete.

The term absurdist was coined by philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) who essentially believed that human existence is absurd, and if we understand that our existence is absurd, how do we live with that knowledge? Camus’ philosophy sought to get to the heart of this particular branch of existentialist enquiry. Zappa’s oeuvre also delves deep into this territory in so many ways as does the work of Phee Jefferies.

This last year, 2024, saw art institutions around the world celebrating the centenary of surrealism, a literary and artistic expression of the absurd. Surreal is a word often used by people about any aspect of life that cannot seemingly be made sense of. An event, a thought, an expression can all be described as being surreal in ways distinct from a painting, a sculpture, a film, a piece of  poetry. The absurdist is one who takes on the philosophical conflict between the meaning of life in the face of its potential meaningless. The surrealist attempts to harness the power of the unconscious as a means of extracting purpose from the human psyche. If we can pick away at our souls without knowing that we are doing so, can we therefore tease out some kind of deeper understanding around the why of human existence?

Despite many exhibitions celebrating 100 years of surrealism, there is one thing that does not really come across to those outside of the art world, and that is the idea that surrealism is still a living, breathing style in which many artists still work. When I hear children being taught about surrealism in schools it is usually in the context of Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and, if they’re lucky, maybe a couple of other notable figures from around the same time. Organised visits to museum/gallery exhibitions no doubt compound the feeling of surrealism as no more than dusty artifacts, fit only for consumption as relics of our recent past. Surrealism is a creative mechanism for the studies and philosophies of the absurdist, and it is this mechanism that is put to fine use by artist Phee Jefferies in her study of the human psyche through her artistic practice. 

The reason I bring up Zappa at the beginning of this piece of contextualisation is to highlight the apparent non-paradox between high and low culture. On the one hand he could be comfortable making the kids in the playground snigger behind their hand at rude musical jokes in the style of ‘Ivor Biggun’ whilst performing for the tuxedo be-decked avant-gardists of the concert hall. It is in this high brow/low brow culture paradox that Phee Jefferies contributes to an aspect of visual art that I do not believe gets picked up on enough. Does humour belong in art? 

The hallowed white wall spaces of galleries the world over are laden with work that are considered worthy. Work that often addresses big issues, contentious issues, issues that pull audiences in different directions often based on readings and/or misreadings of the work up for appraisal. This is all well and good. These kinds of debates need to be had and art can be a good vehicle for those discussions. But, there is one thing that is often missing from the debate within these spaces and that is a human scale. The contemporary white wall gallery is not a place for art, it is a non-place, if you will ‘a space’. These spaces without art are nothing: non-places, activated only by the meaning and content that they are given, a tabula rasa from which to expound ideas and opinions rather than debate meaning. It is with this in mind that I believe the work of people like Phee Jefferies is so important. It brings back a human scale through what at first comes across as low brow humour, yet, upon closer examination reveals a lot more about us than we would imagine, possibly more than we would like to imagine. The works and titles bring ideas back to a human scale and we find ourselves able to relate. 

The front project space of BasementArtsProject has over the years been a straight-forward gallery style environment with paintings, drawings and photographs hung on its walls and sculpture on the floor, albeit without white walls. As an experimental project space it has also become a backstreet gynaecologist's surgery, a strange green and yellow fur lined room screening films about identity and pickled passports amongst jars of home-made pickles, free to take away. We have also staged exhibitions looking at the beauty of geometry in nature and art, plutonic solids and packing theory, experimental analogue photography techniques, hierarchies of materials in relation to art but also to homelessness and the struggles of life in Beeston/Holbeck’s managed zone. This is art at the centre of life trying to work out meaning from within. It is not enough to sit on the sidelines and comment, we must be there at the heart of the matter, constantly picking at the scabs until they bleed. Only from this human perspective can we then start to understand the problems of wider society and the importance of humour in how we make sense of it all. 

A highlight of the last day of installation was, for me, the process of creating the floorplan: every single title a pun, eliciting many laughs from me. Anyone who knows me will know my love of simple humour. Among the sinister ‘Crawler’s’ and ‘Scurriers' of this collection is an ‘Ol’ Ball and Chain’, an argument with physics ‘Does It Matter Which Half Is Full?’, someone zipping themselves into a suitcase ‘Pack Your Shit and Leave’ and a fire extinguisher that has been converted into a flame thrower ‘It’s Really Not That Helpful”. 

‘You’re Doing It Wrong’ is an exhibition of extremely well-made sculptures by a highly competent artist with a searching mind and a brilliant sense of humour, the kind that is missing from the often po-faced world of contemporary art.   

One final example of how humour helps us to understand the pure absurdity of our existence is Viz Magazine (1979-present) a publication that is full of bizarre characters, wordplay, puns, satire and non sequiturs. Phee’s work is not necessarily Viz like because of its humour, but more like the Wikipedia entry for Viz in which straight faced attempts to explain the bizarre and irrational render the subject matter even more inexplicable. In doing so it creates another layer of humour that is funnier than the original concept. This is how I feel Phee’s work operates; layers in which oddness and humour give way to subtlety and a different view of the world; the mind set free whilst the corporeal body is chained to the gradual disembodiment of an ever shifting reality.

Bruce Davies | July 2025

About Phee Jefferies

I have an inherent interest in things cast aside as “junk”, and like to use common objects in uncommon ways to create absurd interpretations of everyday situations. We see things, but we very rarely look at them. I love to analyse the world around me, considering the things that are so normal we don’t even think twice about them and how strange they really are. Through my work I encourage people to notice the weird and wonderful aspects of the human condition, and to embrace them. Once you start then you see absurdity in everything, and even the most mundane objects become full of a bizarre and nonsensical beauty, which makes life so much more exciting!