Rotten Beams Make Fertile Soil
Phil Garber
May 9 - June 7, 2026

What is your sin? 
I will remember.
Are we good?

The work in this exhibition feels simultaneously playful and deeply weighty. An abstracted and torn U.S. flag constructed from red and white acrylic quietly hums as blue liquid courses down its surface. Nearby, a chaotic network of tubes pumps fluid through a gnarled looping system, like the exposed inner workings of a fractured society. Motors twist and strain the tubing into a large, pulsing organism, evoking the image of a civilization peeled open with its entrails laid bare. All contained within a room painted in an industrial safety blue.

I will speak.
I haven’t the strength.
What is sin?

The bedrock of Fertile Soil is Phil’s identity as a disabled person who stutters. Stuttering is a neurological disorder characterized by vocal repetitions, blocks, and elongations that frequently produces extreme social isolation -  we live in a vocal world. The combined pressures of historic attitudes toward stuttering, listeners unfamiliar with disabled speech, and the stutter itself have positioned Phil outside social norms, and from that vantage point, given him the means to interrogate them.  He often creates text-heavy pieces, like Programmatic Snowballing Effect, featuring sixty text cells divided into four-cell subgroups, arranged randomly using custom software. Each iteration forms a three-part poem discussing the psychic journey from the learned hopelessness of witnessing violence as a single individual to the snowball of small actions.

I will dissent.
I want to sleep well.
An honest effort.

Phil is an optimist. In some ways, he believes existing governmental systems are capable of change for the greater good. Necessarily, this optimism is tangled with the fact that many of those systems aren’t working. The pieces shown here reflect this tension. Many are literal systems themselves: Arduino programs, peristaltic pumps, and worm gear motors interact with synthetic materials, which act as analogs for the person-within-system. This approach to material representation reveals a core faith in art as a communication technology. Phil sees art as a semiotic Esperanto. A language that should be accessible to as many people as possible, to use and adapt alongside their native ontologies. 

It’s not happening.
Want my children free.
An honest effort.

All systems of marginalization rhyme; they do not match. The sooner we acknowledge our differences in privilege, societal access, and starting points, while holding equally that which binds us, the sooner we can build a more just and equitable home for all. We can also embrace the paradox of inclusion by acknowledging what divides us. This question of justice is both inherently simple and deeply complicated. Fertile Soil does not attempt to flatten identities or resolve complexity. Its thesis is simple: We are all here, now, together. How do we proceed?