Ashton S. Phillips (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California, working directly with the earth, water, pollution, and more-than-human agents of (dis)repair as primary materials and collaborators. He is interested in the transness of material, the plasticity of bodies (human and nonhuman), and the promise of queer/trans ecological praxis, including interspecies collaboration, experimental “play,” and speculative (un)making, as pathways for making meaning, building resiliency, and generating new forms of knowing/feeling/being in the late Capitalocene.
Recent solo exhibitions and public art commissions include WormHole – A Portal for Plastic Bodies at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles; Feast Cycle at Automata Arts; (Post)Plastic Garden at Torrance Art Museum; and Womb/Tomb/BooM – A Refuge for Plastic Bodies at Maryland Institute College of Art. Ashton holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art; a JD from the George Washington University Law School; and a BA from the University of Maryland, where he served as the first trans president of the university’s LGBT student caucus. He is a resident artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, CA, where he maintains a colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworm/beetles and a plastic-fertilized garden as trans ecological praxis, and a founding member of Pure Filth Society – an experimental sound, sculpture, and performance project.
Artist Location: Long Beach, CA
Sadie Greyduck (she/her) is a transsexual glass witch living in Oakland, CA. Her work utilizes traditional stained glass artisanship, focusing materially on shattered liquor bottles and houseware, as a way to subvert religiosity and question sacred-profane dialectics. Items generated by Greyduck frequently orient themselves to the body as tools/wearables (knives, masks, talismans) and have expanded use within ritual magic contexts. Light installation altars by Greyduck invoke the sublime in a more grandiose manner and use sound collage loop curtains (rain, shattering bottles) for soft violent cathartic warmth. She has composed music for video games, dance, film, and recently released her fourth album Baa.
Artist Location: Oakland, CA
Social Media:
PARTICIPATION
Wishing Well – A Feast Cycle of Fluid (de)Compositions
Pure Filth Society members Ashton S. Phillips and Sadie Greyduck will perform a nonlinear, fluid ecosystem of sonic and material composition and decomposition, contamination and regeneration. Wishing Well will be organized around a well or wells of (plastic) fluids that will be constructed to both receive or “hear” sonic and material inputs and to project or “speak” sonic and visual outputs. The well – a transparent, fluid-tight tank – will be equipped with a transducer that will carry signal from human and non-human voices in the ecosystem, including Greyduck’s double bass, and transfer those signals into the form of mechanical vibrations, which will become visible in the well’s fluid body. The well will also hold a home-made hydrophone which will send a signal to an amp or to an architecturally-embedded transducer, so that participants can “hear” the well’s fluid (de)compositions. The tank(s) will be placed on an overhead projector, so that participants can see the dissolutions, reintegrations, and fluid dynamics.
During the performance, human and nonhuman agents/components of this ecosystem will move through a series of gestures/actions/processes that hold this plastic body of contaminated vibrancy together and/or pull it apart.