Culture & Community | Ely Center of Contemporary Art | Arts & Culture | Visual Arts
“Take this ash and eat.”
A relaxed voice offscreen urges viewers to repent, while a small, controlled fire burns on the video. Around the corner, hundreds of small crosses made by hand with ashes, cover a large, central wall.
The soft glow of red lighting, interrupted by unpleasant flashes and the cackling hums and buzzes from speakers, signal that Prey Drive is a multisensory experience—delivered with a jolt. Organized by SomethingProjects—the curatorial arm of artists Howard el-Yasin and Suzan Shutan—the solo exhibition presents the work of socially and ecologically-engaged artist Ashton S. Phillips through June 22 at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art.
A statement on the art nonprofits website positions the exhibition as an “experiential site of queer ecology, a magical environment outside normative ways of seeing and being.” Phillip’s magic veers toward the dark kind, more toxic than cosmic. Take the red lights or the large, three-dimensional black cross in the center of the room, for starters. There are also two sculptures that resemble decaying pieces of trash—dirty blocks of Styrofoam that seem burned or partially destroyed.
Years ago, the artist, who hails from “Chemical Valley,” West Virginia, began to embrace dirt, plastics, and pollution as a core part of his materials. Styrofoam is a form of plastic, derived from petroleum, and it’s widely known for its inability to break down or biodegrade. Phillips’s use of plastic underscores its ubiquity. These days plastics are everywhere, even inside our own bodies—a fact that inspired the artist’s declaration, “Purity is impossible.”
Alongside the plastics, another undercurrent in Phillips' output is religious symbolism, and the Christian overtones in Prey Drive are far from subtle. Purple and red translucent films have been placed over the large window inside the space, giving the room an eerie, otherworldly sense of light that is heightened by the red lights installed in the corners of the room. Purple is associated with Lent, while red signifies blood or fire in many Christian traditions.
Prey Drive, from SomethingProjects and artist Ashton S. Phillips, runs through June 22 at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Peter R Brown Photos.
The lighting is one of many devices intended to invoke the spiritual. As Phillips explained, “I use materials that are associated with the sacred in Catholic and other religious traditions, including egg tempera, cast chromatic light, essential oils, translucent veils, and water, as a way of asking: Who and what deserves our reverence now? Who and what is really profane, invasive, contaminating? Who, if anyone, is going to come save us from the consequences of our own destructive behaviors?”
A clue to the prominence of the ashen crosses can be found in Phillip’s video, Ashes to Ashes. At one point, Phillips mentions Marco Rubio, the United States Secretary of State, and his appearance on March 5—Ash Wednesday for Christians—with a cross smeared on his forehead. (At the start of the Lenten season, a symbolic cross is drawn on the forehead of the observant.) A devout Catholic, Rubio was lauded by his supporters for this demonstration of his faith and condemned by his detractors for the hypocrisy of the display as he discussed the current administration’s approach to genocide in Gaza on Fox News that morning.
Deeper in the video, Phillips helps visitors connect the volume of crosses on the installation’s central wall when he talks about 527 anti-trans statutes. (The ACLU’s tracker of anti-LGBTQ state legislatures now has a higher number.) From bathroom bans to curriculum censorship, these laws may not all be passed, but there’s harm in their existence even in a propositional state, and the broader agenda is clear. “Trans people have been and are being scapegoated and demonized as something to hate in America, and globally,” said el-Yasin.
The title of the exhibition points to how Phillips interprets the efforts of the Christian right and conservative politicians to dehumanize the queer community: they’re like predators hunting prey. The red flashing lights of Prey Drive allude to those used by hunters. Imperceptible to animals like deer, these lights help hunters see their surroundings, the animals none the wiser. In a similar way, “Trans survival is based on not being invisible and being able to integrate into society,” explained Shutan.
Stay under the red lights inside Prey Drive long enough, and you may start to feel like you are being hunted. At the very least, you can expect to feel uncomfortable, especially when you find the bugs. Peer inside the large sculptural floor cross in front of the wall of crosses, and you’ll find an army of tiny, squirming creatures.
Prey Drive, from SomethingProjects and artist Ashton S. Phillips, runs through June 22 at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Peter R Brown Photos.
These bugs come from a colony of mealworms, cared for by the artist as an essential part of his practice of reenvisioning ecology through a queer lens. The mealworm and the superworm have the ability to process polystyrene into a biodegradable material—as noted in the first of seventy-one “Statement of Facts” that are laser-etched onto plexiglass displayed on a wall in the exhibition. (A QR code points visitors to a PDF of the text, which is hard to decipher inside the space.)
As the mealworms slowly metabolize the waste from discarded Styrofoam—often used to package products during shipping—they add another element for visitors to decode. The crosses are, in fact, made from the mealworm’s frass, or excrement, linking these pieces of the exhibition.
“In a world where trans people and others are routinely dehumanized as dirty, sinful, and insect-like, I’m also thinking about the metaphorical resonance of this work,” Phillips said, “which centers the healing power and resiliency of metamorphosing creatures, and how it subverts traditional ideas about the sacred and the profane.”
Mealworms, crosses, and ash—Prey Drive forces you to consider interconnected cycles, particularly, those found within the landscape and our culture. Beyond this, Phillips’s impassioned plea for empathy lingers long after you leave this hazardous site he’s fabricated. The artist doesn’t want to tell you what it’s like to be trans—or any marginalized individual, for that matter. Rather, he gives you a palpable experience of feeling hunted, of being prey.
He wants you to ask: in what kind of world do humans hunt their own?
Prey Drive continues through June 22, 2025, at Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St, New Haven, CT 06510. An artist talk with Ashton Phillips will take place on June 18 online and at ECoCA.