Ashton Phillips is a multi-sensory installation artist and writer focused on the plasticity of bodies,
the transness of matter, and the poetics of impurity and mutual contamination. His practice prioritizes collaboration, experimental play, speculative (un)making, and embodied research over linear inquiry, hierarchical methods, or stable results. He is particularly interested in the power dynamics of looking, listening, and performing across species, language systems, and other forms of difference. His work experiments with opacity/transparency/reflectivity, environmental color/sound/touch, more-than-human relationships, indeterminacy, (il)legibility, and speculative world-building as strategies for disrupting cisnormative ways of looking, listening, and knowing.
Projects
solo exhibitions
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Prey Drive
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Worm Hole
A Portal for Plastic Bodies
Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles
2024
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Womb/Tomb/BooM
A Refuge for Plastic Bodies
Meyerhoff Gallery
Maryland Institute College of Art
2023
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Feast + Famine
Cerritos College Art Gallery
2022
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Post-Plastic Garden
Studio Systems Experimental Residency
Torrance Art Museum
2024
multi-sensory installations
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Alter Piece
Method
Angles Gate Cultural Center
2024
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Core
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Inosculation Site for Plastic Bodies
NOMAD by Torrance Art Museum
2023
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Surrender Me
Mingle Mangle
Angels Gate Cultural Center
2023
performance + public art
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Urban Birds - The Plasticene
Audubon Center, Debs Park
Angels Gate Cultural Center, Los Angeles
2025
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Breath Work
Directed by Nina Sarnelle
2025
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Feast Cycle
Performed with Pure Filth Society (Eden Knutilla, Sadie Greyduck, + Dylan Ricards)
Automata Arts
2024
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NEST
Collaborative Performance and Installation with Dylan Ricards
Presented as part of Ebb & Flow Festival by Heidi Duckler Dance with Dancer Colleen Loverde
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Playground at ArtBug Gallery with Dylan Ricards
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Sky Burial
presented as part of Urban Birds by Synchromy Music
with Sharon Chohi Kim
Audobon Center Debs Park
Arlington Gardens
2023
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becoming insect/plastic/dirt
presented as part of Ebb & Flow festival by Heidi Duckler Dance with dancers Eden Knutilla and Andrea Nhuch
Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook
2022
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Sound Pedro
2020 - 2024
writing
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Womb/Tomb/BooM: Trans Studies Quarterly
July 2024
Womb/Tomb/BooM is a multisensory, trans-ecological art installation that invites human visitors to share space, air, and flesh with styrofoam-metabolizing beetle larvae and the plastic waste they inhabit and consume. Wherever possible, barriers between human, insect, and plastic have been removed to create a shared sensory wormspace of metamorphosis-friendly light, sound, and material. Where those barriers could not be removed, the barriers themselves become key actors in the space, frustrating the cisgender gaze's desire for a good-hard look at these shape-shifting insects and structuring the ways that humans can and cannot move through the space.
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Subverting the Cisgaze: Antennae Journal
Summer 2024
Thinking and feeling with a multisensory Womb/Tomb/BooM of plastic bodies - insect, polystyrene, and human, this essay theorizes, critiques, and examines ways of subverting the “cishuman” gaze, including its fixation on legibility, moral and material purity, and its desire for complete and “resolved”works/bodies/objects. Can art embrace a poetics of opacity and illegibility, focusing on the pleasure, discomfort, and generative power of darkness and perpetual metamorphosis, instead? Can we frustrate the power dynamics of pity and objectification by inviting “viewers” into environments that confront them with the impurity, vulnerability, and plasticity (or transness) of their own bodies.
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Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
March 18, 2025
Text by Ashton S. Phillips
press
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In "Prey Drive," The Hunter & The Hunted
Jacquelyn Gleisner | June 10th, 2025
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Life and Agency in a Polluted World: Ashton Phillip’s choreographies in Material, Body, and Interspecies Systems
EcoArt Space Interview
Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein
February 10, 2025
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Studio Visit with Ashton Phillips, (MFAST), Five Emerging Artists to Watch
Bmore Art (July 19, 2023)(interview by Editor Cara Ober with photography by Jill Fannon)
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Meet Ashton Phillips | Interdisciplinary Artist
Shoutout SoCal Interview
December 28, 2020
Talks
about
Ashton grew up in “Chemical Valley” West Virginia, sharing water, ground, and sky with legions of forever chemicals spewing out from the nearby plastic plants and mountain-top coal mines. Today, he is a resident artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, CA, where he maintains a living colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworm/beetles and a plastic-fertilized garden as trans ecological praxis. When he is not (un)making with, writing about, and caring for these shapeshifting creatures, he teaches about care, posthuman praxis, and creative action at Otis College of Art and Design, performs with the Pure Filth Society, and curates at Monte Vista Projects.
Reach out
I’m always down to talk about art, ideas, and potential collaborations and projects. Don’t be shy to reach out.
Trailers
Breath Work directed by Nina Sarnelle
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Prey Drive
Ely Center for Contemporary Art, New Haven, Connecticut 2025
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![An image of Greenspacing.]()
Worm Hole
Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, 2024
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![An image of Womb/Tomb/BooM]()
Womb/Tomb/BooM
Meyerhoff Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, 2023
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![image of Feast + Famine]()
Feast + Famine
Cerritos College Gallery of Art, Cerritos, California 2022
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Altar Piece
Method, Embodiment, Ecology, and Technology Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, California 2024
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Urban Bird - The Plasticene
Developed through months of close engagement with the staff and patients of the clinic, the festival will debut a new interspecies opera with a libretto and score sourced from conversations with the Bird Rescue staff and patients along with choreography from Jasmine Albuquerque developed from direct observation of the bird patients.
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(post)plastic garden
Studio Systems, Torrance Art Museum
