How do you stay in your skin? Butoh hands claw their way out of Russian Doll-like figures growing out of each other. Tally marks count the days in a literal prison or the prison of one's mind. Sticky notes keep tabs on runaway thoughts. Windows serve as tiny portals into a traumatic past that refuses to die in the living mind.
Missexpandinguniverse.com
Missexpandinguniverse.com
Missexpandinguniverse.com
Artist Biography
Artist Biography
Miss Expanding Universe aka Ashley Yang-Thompson aka Trashley is the author of the underground self-help cult-classic How to be the worst laziest fattest most incontinent piece-of-shit in the world EVER, published by Bateau Press. She is the co-mastermind of WORM SLUT, a Portland-based weekly zine that celebrates mesh crop tops, the Right To Be Lazy, burritos, spending beyond your means and the metonymy of sucking.
Interview
ET:
What are you reading right now?
I’ve been obsessively reading Jonathan Franzen’s oeuvre in the past month… The Corrections, Freedom (crying in the coffee shop), Purity, and now Crossroads. Also Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror.
ET:
What are you reading right now?
I’ve been obsessively reading Jonathan Franzen’s oeuvre in the past month… The Corrections, Freedom (crying in the coffee shop), Purity, and now Crossroads. Also Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror.
ET:
Has a work of art ever changed you or been pivotal to your life or saved you?
I experienced Stendhal Syndrome -- a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to artworks or phenomena of great beauty and antiquity -- firsthand when I entered Pippilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest exhibition at the New Museum. I felt as though I had recaptured my child’s eye, the anti-inflammatory sense of wonder that allows for things to be something other than what they appear to be…
ET:
Has a work of art ever changed you or been pivotal to your life or saved you?
I experienced Stendhal Syndrome -- a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to artworks or phenomena of great beauty and antiquity -- firsthand when I entered Pippilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest exhibition at the New Museum. I felt as though I had recaptured my child’s eye, the anti-inflammatory sense of wonder that allows for things to be something other than what they appear to be…
ET;
What's your love life like?
I’m obsessed with colleague who has a partner, I sat on a married man’s face who was old enough to be grandfather every afternoon last summer, I have millennial voicenote sex with a poet across the country, I’m attracted to balding men because I never knew my father, I’m a serial seduce & destroyer, and I’m a closeted lesbian. These are all half truths.
ET;
What's your love life like?
I’m obsessed with colleague who has a partner, I sat on a married man’s face who was old enough to be grandfather every afternoon last summer, I have millennial voicenote sex with a poet across the country, I’m attracted to balding men because I never knew my father, I’m a serial seduce & destroyer, and I’m a closeted lesbian. These are all half truths.
ET:
What is your favorite food?
Burritos & meat sticks, but mostly I stick to my “health mounds,” which is also my favorite word for cunt.
ET:
What is your favorite food?
Burritos & meat sticks, but mostly I stick to my “health mounds,” which is also my favorite word for cunt.
ET:
What do you think of the word "work"?
Work is necessary. Someone has to do it. If no one was working, no one would be manufacturing toilets, and I’d have to poop out the window.
That being said, the dancer Susan Rethorst wrote in the remarkable essay “Play Profound” that rigor is doing whatever it takes to play profound, which rings psychic cherries of felt truth.
ET:
What do you think of the word "work"?
Work is necessary. Someone has to do it. If no one was working, no one would be manufacturing toilets, and I’d have to poop out the window.
That being said, the dancer Susan Rethorst wrote in the remarkable essay “Play Profound” that rigor is doing whatever it takes to play profound, which rings psychic cherries of felt truth.
ET:
Are you burnt out ever?
I experienced Stendhal Syndrome -- a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to artworks or phenomena of great beauty and antiquity -- firsthand when I entered Pippilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest exhibition at the New Museum. I felt as though I had recaptured my child’s eye, the anti-inflammatory sense of wonder that allows for things to be something other than what they appear to be…
ET:
Are you burnt out ever?
I experienced Stendhal Syndrome -- a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to artworks or phenomena of great beauty and antiquity -- firsthand when I entered Pippilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest exhibition at the New Museum. I felt as though I had recaptured my child’s eye, the anti-inflammatory sense of wonder that allows for things to be something other than what they appear to be…
ET:
How do you cope with burnout?
I drink a bunch of magnesium water and shit until I feel empty inside.
ET:
How do you cope with burnout?
I drink a bunch of magnesium water and shit until I feel empty inside.
ET:
What is your go-to karaoke song?
Phantom of the Opera
ET:
What is your go-to karaoke song?
Phantom of the Opera
