Phil Peters’ transdisciplinary art practice explores the evolving relationship between the built and natural world through audio, video, and sculptural installations. Speculative architectural histories, contemporary ecology, and slippages between the biologic and geologic all inform this work.
Phil Peters’ recent projects recording subsurface oil industry vibrations in the port of Long Beach, and in the Permian Basin in Texas, and building gigantic sculptural and room-sized speakers to present these recordings, has been shown at co-Lab in Austin, Texas, Canary Test in LA, and written about in Hyperallergic, and you can find more on his work here.
Phil Peters received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and a BA from Carleton College in Northfield, MN. In 2014-15 he co-founded and curated an artist run project space LODGE (In Service of the Dark Arts), Chicago, IL. Exhibitions of his work include “Build Carry” at The Arts Club of Chicago’s Drawing Room (2017), Outside/In at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2019), “The Port of Long Beach Recordings” at The Canary Test, Los Angeles, CA (2022), and “The Permian Recordings” at Co-Lab Projects, Austin, Tx (2022). Phil lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
about the artist’s most recent project in Austin:
“The Permian Recordings are a series of durational subterranean field recordings that capture the low-frequency vibrations of the Permian Basin in West Texas… The Permian Basin is home to one of the world largest oil and gas extraction industries, while at the same time it is named for a geologic epoch whose end demarcates a period of catastrophic climate change and the largest mass extinction in the history of the earth. The frequencies in these recordings are both document and phenomenon: an aggregate of the hum of generators, the hammer of sand trucks down private roads, and the drone of drill bits churning invisible below the surface. How does one conceptualize a system so large in scope and consequence that it has passed over into the geologic? Standing in a field we hear the trucks and can count the towers and flares, but it’s only when we look down from satellites that we see the perfect grid of exhausted wells stretching for miles in all directions. But what of all we cannot see? The subterranean network of pipes and reservoirs, or the export of these mining technologies around the world, and of course the supply chain of oil whose thick black pipes that snake along roadsides throughout the permian eventually divide into the delicate vasculature that feeds every aspect of our individual lives?”