Paulette Phillips (born 1956) is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her conceptually oriented art practice combines film and video installation, sculpture, photography and performance. Phillips is a professor at Ontario College of Art & Design University where she has taught studio practice in film, installation and performance since 1986. A graduate of York University (2008) and the Canadian Film Centre (1992), Phillips became a certified polygraph examiner after completing a course at the Maryland Institute for Criminal Justice (2009). Phillips is represented by Diaz Contemporary (Toronto) and Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art (London). Art practice Focussed on witnessing, looking and reflection, Phillips' work deals with the relationship between (female) subject and viewer. Consistent throughout her work is an interest in the way psychological content is embedded in the physical world, a tendency Phillips strives to make visible via the depiction of contradictions. The artist has stated "I am interested in paradox and conflict, unease, humour and contradiction." An explicit aim of Phillips' work is to in some way destabilize the viewer. In his essay, The Secret Life of Criminals, Gordon Hatt writes: "Phillips invites us into scenarios…that penetrate our contentment and direct us to recall the source of our own compulsive narratives and…anxieties." In the videowork, It's About How People Judge Appearance (2000) a well-dressed women violently bangs her head against a brick wall, walks away and then does it again. The video projection The Floating House (2002) in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada features a half-scale Gothic revival house sinking in deep water off the coast of Nova Scotia. The film projection Crosstalk (2004), which was exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2006 as part of the exhibition "We can do this now" and is in the collection of Frac Normandie on-lookers encircle and stare at the gallery viewer positioned in place of an implied off-screen traumatic event. As part of an extensive art work begun in 2009 Phillips has been conducting lie testing with the denizens or the art world in London, Paris, Dublin, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and Banff. Using her training as a certified polygraph examiner Phillips' polygraph's responses to a series of question about honesty, probing the limits of portraiture's territory to trap, capture, probe, witness and archive. In a number of works, Phillips investigates the cultural significance of architectural monuments. Commissioned for Toronto's Nuit