And He Built a Crooked House

Prospect Art presents Minna Philips: And He Built a Crooked House
October 5 – November 2, 2025
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 5, 4–6 PM
Winslow Garage, 3540 Winslow Drive, Los Angeles 90026

Prospect Art is pleased to present And He Built a Crooked House, a solo exhibition by Minna Philips, recipient of the 2025 NEW WORK Focus on Los Angeles grant. The exhibition runs from October 5 through November 2 at Winslow Garage in Silverlake.

Inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction short story And He Built a Crooked House, Philips’ installation reimagines the story’s dimensional experimentation through a spatial arrangement of sculptures and drawings. Loosely modeled on the unfolded form of a tesseract, the works explore ideas of space-time, connectivity, and perception. Installed within Winslow Garage, the project engages in a site-specific dialogue: while Heinlein’s fictional house embodies sleek geometric precision, the garage’s crooked architecture and uneven floor disrupt the clean minimalism of the black-and-white works, creating tension between site and form.

Using a restrained palette, Philips emphasizes form, texture, and material nuance. Graphite plays a central role in both the drawings and the sculptures—not only as a medium for mark-making, but also as a means of creating surface depth and tonal variation. Referencing Robert Smithson’s idea of spaces that “exist between mind and matter, detached from both,” the installation positions meaning in the shifting relationships between objects, space, and viewer. As visitors navigate the exhibition, these relationships transform, mirroring the instability of Heinlein’s crooked house and the constant reinvention embedded in the fabric of Los Angeles.

Minna Philips is a contemporary artist from India, living in Inglewood, California. Her works explore the nature of reality, particularly the higher dimensional theory in physics that proposes the existence of extra dimensions and “branes” that suggest the confinement of our universe on one of the many membranes in higher dimensions. She is also inspired by natural patterns and the in-between nature of her identity as an immigrant. Her architectural drawings explore spaces as they relate to our bodies and perception, highlighting these ideas. Minna's works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are in private and public collections, including the Los Angeles Museum of Art. Her work Memory is part of the Moon Gallery project based in the Netherlands and will eventually find a permanent place on the Moon in 2025.