MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

February 10, 2025

This month we recognize      Ashton  Phillips    in an interview with Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein.

Life and Agency in a Polluted World: Ashton Phillip’s choreographies in Material, Body, and Interspecies Systems

Ashton Phillips exists and creates work at intersections that blossom into expansive universes of possibility often left out and attacked by cultural norms and laws. Integrating polluted earth with decontaminating species, refuse with refuge, and experiential choreographies integrating the viewer, his work expands past materiality and into life. In our interview, Ashton discusses the power of experience as embodied through interactions between the body, earth, and cultural consciousness to empower and heal in the face of destructive forces and toxic consequences.

Ashton, you have been on such an impactful journey through your work. For example, you grew up in “Chemical Valley” West Virginia and now focus on pollution in material, identity, and land. How has your experience of the polluted environment guided your mission as an artist?

I have always felt like I was living inside of a contaminated, impure, or injured body/world. And I have always felt a certain sadness in the face of that. The other slogan for the place I grew up, besides Chemical Valley, was “Wild and Wonderful.” And it was true. That place was simultaneously wild, vibrant, lush, watery, and chemical, toxic, desiccated, dying. Just like all of us.

There was a very palpable tension to being alive—or being a living body—inside that polluted ecosystem. Something like dysphoria. My practice emerged from this dysphoric/euphoric tension. Can we see this pollution and the fear it brings—the disgust, the grief—as teachers or even friends of our own precariousness, adaptability, and interdependence? Holding it close like a hungry baby bird with a broken wing?

I do not fear the pollution anymore. I fear the people who do not see it or pretend it is not there.

 

Wow, that hits home… What a powerful statement about the consequences of embedded hypocracy. You also have a background in law advocacy as well as being a professional artist. How do these contrasting professions inform your empowerment practice?

I no longer practice law, but my relationship to my art practice is very much informed by my training and experience as a lawyer. Lawyers think facts “argue” better than rhetoric or moral appeals. And that the only facts that count are those that can be admitted into evidence.

My socially-engaged, research-based, public art practice is not that different in method, but my audience is no longer a judge or jury. I am not trying to convince the public that I am “right” about anything or “slap them on the wrist” through the law. Instead, I want people to feel something, to be confused, to make intuitive connections across time and space, to find a glimmer of desire or hope in the pits of despair, to forget the cis-hetero-normative power structures and systems of language that dominate their everyday headspace and tune in to the patterns of relation that connect us to the ground, the insect, the waste Styrofoam floating in the surf, and the bird that carries it away.

When you describe it this way, it sounds like your work is about adapting culture through various methods including sound, performance, participatory installation, and direct environmental response. What factors guide your choice of medium and approach to a work?

A big change came in grad school, when I was challenged to think critically about my “viewer” and what kind of experience I wanted for them. Was my work the “finished” art object that resulted from my experience of connection with materials and place? Or was it the experience itself? Did I want to share that experience with my “viewer” and, if so, what is the most impactful way to do that? Is my work a story about my own life and growth or is it an offering to others to engage with the world differently based on my own experience?

It worked. My first semester in grad school was liberating and cathartic. I tried every material and medium/technology that held my curiosity. I gathered materials, like words - yards of used rubber roofing, chiffon mixed with steel, clay with silicone, and concrete casts with feathers, wool, house paint, and latex tubing inside. I stacked, lashed, cast, balanced, and sewed these materials together on the floor, hanging them from the ceiling, stapling them to the wall. I avoided permanent adhesives and attachments as a kind of creative death. I wanted everything to be mobile and unfixed - to keep the parts moving, unstable, and ready to be broken down and reworked.

Instead of making separate stable works with individual titles and dates, these were improvisational choreographies of material and flow - a performance of material itself and an activation of space that included the body of the viewer in the dance. My art practice began and continues to tune out of the world of argument, bullying, screaming, moralizing, shame, and tuning into to the immediacy, pleasure - and sometimes wonder - of materials, color, the ground beneath me and the interspecies systems of life and agency all around me.

You are engaging such complex systems through your work’s materiality, interactions, and site-specificity. What does your sourcing process look like? And what considerations do you make in choosing materials that will interact with each other?

My work is relational—a way of thinking/feeling/being with a place, a creature, an unfolding ecosystem of contamination, trauma, and the possibility of metamorphosis and repair—and inviting others into that experience. I choose materials that interact with each other according to their own animacies, so that the work can include agencies, marks, and sounds reflecting these larger systems of interrelated power and subjectivity. 

For example, I started working with plastic-metabolizing mealworms and Styrofoam plastic because I was fascinated by the fact that these creatures could biodegrade plastic in their bodies without any harm to themselves, and I wanted to understand more about how this worked. This power changed so much of my thinking about the world.

An essay I wrote about my interspecies art practice was published in a special issue on Trans* Ecologies by Trans Studies Quarterly. The essay articulates my thoughts about how structuring spaces to the sensory preferences of plastic-metabolizing insects can also produce a sort of speculative refuge for trans people and others who are otherwise subject to the punishing cis/white gaze in public space.

The connections you are creating between Trans*& Queer Ecologies and interspecies collaborations sit at a really important intersection between empowerment and awareness. It makes me wonder how your mission has changed over time, and in response to how the US culture has/is developed/ing?

The more recent rise of anti-trans panic-baiting and the wholesale removal of legal protections for trans people at the State and Federal levels has also impacted my relationship to my “viewer” and my sense of purpose. I feel a responsibility to speak to the world as a trans person now and to make the trans-ness of my work more explicit. I will not be bullied into silence by these fear mongers in chief. And I hope my voice and practice can empower others to keep making, speaking, and connecting in defiance of these disturbing efforts to silence and erase us from public life.

This week, another trans artist asked me what I am doing as a teacher to hold space for trans, queer, and BIPOC students in the face of this disturbing onslaught coming from the new Presidential Administration. I told her:

I am trying to turn myself and my students toward the queerness and trans-ness of the nonhuman world, which does not give a sh*t about our laws or taxonomies.
Because the future is trans.

Ashton S. Phillips     is a socially and ecologically-engaged artist and writer working with dirt, water, pollution, plasticity, and interspecies agents of (dis)repair as primary materials, collaborators, and teachers. He brings an ecological, trauma-informed approach to his teaching, prioritizing collaboration, play, speculative (un)making, and embodied research over top-down modalities. He 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 openly trans president of the university’s LGBT student caucus. His creative and critical writing have been published by Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Art and Cake, Cambridge University Press, and Trans Studies Quarterly. Phillips is a resident artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, California, where he maintains a living colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworm/beetles and a plastic-fertilized garden as trans ecological praxis. When he is not making, writing, teaching, and caring for metamorphosing creatures, he serves as a creative consultant and trauma-informed art teacher for survivors of adverse-childhood experiences at the SHARK Clinic at Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Hospital and curates exhibitions and performances at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, California. ashtonsphillips.com

Featured images (top to bottom): ©Ashton Phillips, "“3 - Feast & Famine,” installation still, mealworms in larval, pupae, and beetle forms, partially consumed styrofoam, offertory flowers and found feather, 2021-2023; “Install 5 – Feast & Famine,” 2021-2023; “Worm Hole -A Portal for Plastic Bodies," 2024, Photo by Gemma Lopez; “Installation 6 – Feast & Famine”, 2021-2023; "Womb/Tomb/BooM – A Refuge for Plastic Bodies," 2023, live mealworms, live darkling beetles, partially consumed styrofoam, egg tempera, handsewn mosquito netting, pine, faux leather, aluminum flashing, sound equipment, synthetic fur, plywood, violet vinyl and acrylic sheet, stereo cable, contaminated dirt, carrots, and flowering weeds, 15 x 18 x 20 feet;portrait of the artist by Jill Fannon in Bmore Art Magazine (below).