Composed by
Performed by
Filmed by
Jennifer Bewerse & Cassia Streb
Mail Art
about the art
This month highlights two projects that examine the interplay between nature, human intervention, and processes of transformation. Artists Ashton Philips and Alicia Piller encourage us to consider what shifts when we embrace the unstable, incomplete, and dissonant nature of all bodies.
In the film Feast Cycle, the Pure Filth Society creates an interspecies web of instrumental sounds, field recordings, and amplified sounds of mealworms and beetles consuming styrofoam, transforming it into organic matter. Directed by Ashton Phillips, the performance features Sadie Greyduck (glass witch/composer), Eden Knutilla (performance artist), Dylan Ricards (electronics and percussion), and a colony of over 10,000 styrofoam-metabolizing mealworms.
As Ashton asks, “what happens when we admit that all art is more-than-human and that nonhumans have a collaborative role to play in everything we do? That there is no realm of pure humanity that exists separate and apart from “nature”? That we are all animals, and microbes, and plastic, shifting form and metabolising each other?”
Multimedia artist Alicia Piller’s “Reconfiguration 4” is a digital collage created from a sculptural body of work in which she dissected seven sycamore seeds, reconstructing them into new forms with vinyl, rubber, latex, balloons, and other recycled elements. These sculptures were inspired by the idea of entering a community or environment and reshaping its components—transforming them into something entirely new, for better or worse. By reconfiguring these sculptures using digital collage, Alicia enters into conversation with the filmed insects in Feast Cycle, evoking a creature like a worm or insect.