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About.


Artist Statement. 

My practice is a mixed approach to articulation. My work a layered contact of intention and subject, understanding the photo as a symbolic means of communication. I am interested in time and its connection to place, ritual, and matrilineal descent. My family and our history are important to me. I often concentrate on generational connection and am inspired by my ties to those women and men who came before me. I use the photograph to explore emotions surrounding my own experience with mental health, and the processing of loss. Typically working in 35mm black and white film, I create dark dreamscapes that focus on the juxtapositions of post colonial belonging in connection to place; specifically in
relation to my own 
matrilineal decent.

 Emphasizing the
contemporary
 
constructions of race, class & gender in the United States. Exploring this in connection to class politics and social conformity in production and outcome. Informed from both historical and contemporary critical thought. Like Bell Hooks, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Anna Gaskel,
Luis González Palma,
David Lynch, Judith Vicenti, Maya Deren, and Lola Alvarez Bravo who came before me I hope to produce new and innovative complex interpretation through image production, cultural criticism, and making. I create art to process emotion and experience and look forward to continuing on this path of education and professorship to support my own creative growth and inspire systematic change.

 
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Bio. 2022.

Ashley is a mother, a daughter, and a granddaughter. A partner, an educator and a friend. She was born and raised in Santa Cruz California, spending much of her childhood on the shores of California's beautiful coast. She is an alumni of California State University Monterey Bay, from which she holds a BA in Visual and Public Art, with a minor in Human Communication.

Ashley also holds an MFA in Photography from San José State University. In her time at SJSU she continued to work conceptually, critically exploring her own ties to the land currently known as New Mexico. She completed her MFA with a critical theory driven body of work entitled "The Mission Project," which explores her Northern New Mexican Heritage. Ashley is a direct descendent of the Abáachi Mizaa (Spanish Colonized Jicarilla Apache) and her matrilineal ancestral decent was centric to this project. A body of work in conversation with american enculturation, indignity in the South West and her families story in particular.

Ashleys practice is, as always, in conversation with post colonial personhood, and understandings of belonging in connection to place. It is this concept in relation to the practice of photography itself that has motivated her most recent work. Ashley is a contemporary artist and critical theorist with an interest in colonial born constructions, which produce maladaptive movement on occupied land.

 
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