Ashton S. Phillips
Exposed
2020
exposed tree root, exposed urban earth, scrap industrial aluminum, rain, leaves, & weeds
site-specific installation approximately 30 x 24 x 6 inches
I selected this work because I think it speaks to the moment we are all living through. I began digging these holes/pits/abstracted graves in the earth in early February as the CoVID pandemic started appearing in the news. This is the last one I completed before being quarantined to my home on March 19. I originally titled this work "As Above, So Below", thinking of the work as a gesture to the interrelatedness of all material reality and the artificiality of manmade boundaries, like city/ground, culture/nature, body/environment. I still think the work addresses those ideas, but, as the pandemic has spread and triggered indefinite state-wide "stay at home" orders, I have come to see this work, more and more, as an expression of vulnerability and grief. So, I am submitting it with a new title: "Exposed." Like these roots that were once concealed and protected by the soft earth around them, we are all now exposed. Exposed to the novel coronavirus, yes, but also exposed to the naiveté of our ways of thinking about the world before. We must now face our own vulnerability and interdependence, just as a bare root depends on the rain, the soil, and its place within a larger living organism for survival. Once severed from the root network and cut off from the tree, the root will die. The virus is teaching us, we are not so different. There is beauty and terror in this. May we look into the empty graves that are being dug all around us, fill them with more tears than bodies, and learn to see the sky in the bare ground.
