Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

Income’s Outcome is a project that began when the artist Danica Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her son pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those drawings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands holding things, cookies and eggs and apples. “Each time a batch of drawings is sold,” she says of the project, “it creates a window into my life where I draw what I spend money on until that money is gone and then the window closes.”