FEAST CYCLE - An Interspecies (De)composition
Ashton Phillips
July 12, 2o24

July 8-13: Ashton Phillips in residence at Automata. For the residency, Ashton will be experimenting with new modes of inter and intraspecies connection, with a focus on listening, hearing, touch, and both composing and decomposing structures of sound and material. 

 

Friday July 12th at 8pm: join us for the premiere of FEAST CYCLE - An Interspecies (De)composition, as part of Automata's TAPETAIL series.  Ashton Phillips will be joined by members of the Pure Filth Society ensemble, including founding member Dylan Ricards and new ensemble members: musician, broken-glass sculptor, and composer Sadie Robison and performance artist, bear-whispered, and experimental musician Eden/Tapsa/Lo Knutilla
 
Act 1 of the FEAST CYCLE will build a plastic body of sound incorporating the sounds of creatures that can consume and metabolize pollution alongside the sounds of bodies and materials that have been nourished and transformed by these metamorphoses. Human performers will listen, hear, expand on, and respond to these more-than-human agencies, creating an interspecies web of plasticity and care to hold all the beings in the space. A movement-based performance will run simultaneously focusing on the plasticity of the performers’ body and its relationship to the other plastic bodies in the installation. 
 
Act II of the FEAST CYCLE will transform the space into a partially darkened and partially illuminated chamber for connection with the subterranean realm of dirt, fungi, water, and metamorphosis. The Act will feature an improvisational projection of myceliated water bubbling and flowing over fungal hyphae as they break open into fields of egg tempera, spreading webs of connection as they eat and grow. The Pure Filth Ensemble will perform a live score with this improvisational projection, becoming ground, fungi, and murky water, dripping with the possibility of opacity and repair. 
 
TICKETS for FEAST CYCLE
General Admission: $18
Students, Members, Seniors, Artists:  $15


SATURDAY JULY 13, 3 PM TO 5 PM :  WORM TIME  (Free, enter any time)
 
Ashton will host a FREE open Worm Time from 3-5pm on Saturday, July 13th. Members of the public (all ages) are invited to come through Automata and meet and interact with Ashton’s non-human collaborators, including a colony of mealworm insects who are feasting on styrofoam and a colony of earthworms and isopods who are decomposing plant remains inside the space. The worms will also be live mic’d during Worm Time with their sounds amplified through the architecture of Automata, creating a sonic, tactile, and olfactory world of metamorphosis and de/re-composition in the flesh. 

About the Artist:

Ashton S. Phillips 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; (Post)Plastic Garden at Torrance Art Museum; Womb/Tomb/BooM - A Refuge for Plastic Bodies at Maryland Institute College of Art; Feast + Famine at Cerritos College Art Gallery; becoming plastic/insect/earth at Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook in Culver City, CA; Sky Burial at The Audubon Center, Debs Park, Los Angeles, CA; and Reflections at Glendale Central Park, Glendale, CA. His work has also been featured in Bmore Art Magazine, Art and Cake, The Gallup Independent, The Gallup Sun, Albuquerque Magazine, and The Santa Fe Reporter.  
 
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. His critical and creative writing have been published by Cambridge University Press, Art and Cake, and Antennae -  The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (forthcoming). 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.

Tapetail is Automata’s new experimental sound series, launched in October 2022.
 
Tapetail presents live events and sound installations featuring the work of experimental sound artists.
We are currently looking to present shows and installations that deal with "liveness" where something about the experience is best presented live, whether through improvisation, special acoustic treatment or audience experience. There’s been a lot of great art happening in the virtual and digital world so now we’re turning our focus back towards bringing people together for sound experiences that are best experienced in a live setting.

Automata’s Tapetail series
is curated by Cassia Streb.

If you are interested in proposing work for the Tapetail series,
please fill out this short query form.