* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Ashley Garrett was born in Dover, New Jersey and lives and works in New York, NY.
Ashley explains the work by saying, “I like the grungy, smelly action of physically entering a flat surface through oil paint, as loaded as it is with history and meaning, and emerging with an image that is neither real nor wholly illusory. My work is an investigation of early home life, of place, and the traces of memory that form my understanding and perception of objects and spaces. I grew up in a small rural quarry town in Northeastern Pennsylvania surrounded by farmland, wide gray skies, rain-filled quarry holes, and huge piles of slag slate that crowded the roadsides. My work synthesizes the experience of growing up in a town where the once-prolific slate production is no longer viable and now the empty weight of a past era hangs like a fog over the town and it’s people. The ambition of these works is to hold that space between states when an image becomes obviously figurative, before the moment of complete transformation, and the presence of a curiosity or mystery as if one is contemplating an object for the first time.”
