Over the past few years, Toronto-based artist Paulette Phillips has been studying the art world’s capacity for truth, using a lie-detector machine from the 1970s to measure it. Phillips’s studio is on the top two floors of her Queen West home. She keeps the installation setup of the project on the first floor; on the second, art, true crime and forensics books surround drawers of meticulously organized polygraphs she’s done with artists, writers and curators in Canada and around the world.
Associate editor David Balzer and video intern Byron Chan recently visited Phillips’s studio to take a deeper look at this fascinating project.