Artists in Residence
Nicki Green + Ashton Phillips
September 6-14, 2025
DIVINE PORTENT: A JOULE BRICK FACTORY
SEPTEMBER 6-14, 2025
AUTOMATA is thrilled to host artists Nicki Green and Ashton Phillips, as they develop their multi-faceted collaborative project: DIVINE PORTENT --- JOULE BRICK FACTORY. Ashton and Nicki have been making bricks at Automata, with artists and community members, as the first stage of HOWL, an exhibition and performance series that will take place at HUMAN RESOURCES, September 14 - 21, 2025.
These myceliated joule bricks, built with damaged local earth and cast with the seeds of their own repair, are are being collectively cast and developed inside Automata, and then stamped with the phrase “Divine Portent” - an invocation of the deeper etymological roots of the word “monster” as described by trans scholar Susan Stryker in her influential essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix - Performing Transgender Rage.” The bricks shimmer in a shifting multiplicity of performative roles: part trans riot object, part regenerative building block, and part supernatural warning or “divine portent” from the mouths, hands, and bodies of the so-called monstrous.
HOWL / PROCESSION
SEPTEMBER 14, 2025 AT 2 PM
The September 14 event will begin at Automata with a gathering followed by a public procession of 100 Divine Portent joule bricks through the streets of Chinatown, ending at Human Resources (410 Cottage Home St, Los Angeles, CA 90012) where they will be exhibited as part of HOWL, a public (anti)monument to trans resistance, solidarity, resiliency, and earthy non-hierarchical/collective power.
The procession will be led by Divine Portent artists Nicki Green and Ashton Phillips with support from other trans, nonbinary, and trans-affirming artists and community members responding to the call to help carry this burden and this potential for regeneration and repair.
HOWL / EXHIBITION AND PERFORMANCES
SEPTEMBER 14 - 21, 2025 at Human Resources
HOWL brings together more than a dozen artists and collectives working collaboratively to resist the forces of anti-trans silencing, intimidation, and erasure for a series of workshops, panel discussions, a howling experimental film premiere, and a night of defiant performances to help us remember - and share - our power.
Participating HOWL artists include: Badly Licked Bear, Luka Fisher, Elizabeth Frances Folk, Leslie Foster, Edgar Fabian Frias, Aroussiak Gabriellan, Wesleigh Gates, Nicki Green, Sadie Greyduck, Beatrice Gosse, Johanna Hedva, Umi Hsu, Eden Knutilla, Luce de Lire, Mathilda Lazelle Moore, Pau Pescador, Tanner Pfeiffer & 8TPS, Jynx Prado, Ashton Phillips, Dylan Ricards & Denice Valdez, Alystair Rogers, Nina Sarnelle, Marco Schindelmann, Cassia Streb, Salvador de la Torre, Xina Xurner.