Scott Ashley

Scott Ashley is an American conceptual artist working across sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, fiber and installation. Born in Boston and raised in Seattle, in Washington State's wine country, he is known for his re-appropriation of everyday objects: hand-knitted garden hoses, garden spades fitted with neon light, fumigated doll houses and a cursed electric guitar. He uses familiar objects and cultural constructs to create provocative, emotionally charged works that transform our learned archetypes and paradigms into extreme versions of themselves and challenge personal and societal perceptions.

He studied at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, where he became a fine printmaker and developed a fascination with expressing his ideas through many media at once, and went on to a Master of Fine Arts in New Forms at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he refined his conceptual approach, taking on a different material with each project so as to discover a new reading of the subject. His work explores the psychological relationships we have with the objects and people we encounter in everyday life, examining the cognitive and the physical world at the same time. Though often critical, it is not cynical; it comes from a determination to express the personal, emotional and psychological states we all share and our deep connections to the material world, and the results are strange, sometimes humorous manifestations with a foot in both realms. He often uses cartoon-like imagery and visual humor, because the humor of an absurd shape or situation gives an immediate point of access to the darker and more serious themes beneath. As he says, many people assume that because the work is often dark he is unhappy, but he is attracted to the absurdity of existence and the complexity of human experience and tries to make work that points those things out.

His solo exhibition Adaptation at Julie Keyes Gallery in New York in 2011 showed some of his most elaborate work. Talent Possessed is an installation of an electric guitar, its case, an amplifier and neon letters; the guitar was taken to a Haitian voodoo priest, who over a week-long ritual installed a soul into its mechanics, and the piece asks what talent is in a mass consumer culture and whether it is inherent or can be manufactured. St. Sebastian, a giant spinning disco ball pierced by arrows, plays on the martyr's transformation into a gay icon. The Apology, a sculpture of an improbably hinged knife, carries the quixotic spirit and humor of René Magritte: the knife is at once a weapon, a domestic tool and a phallic symbol, an aggressive act one would want to retract. His paintings Logic and Lust, in which he found his own reflection alongside two large target images in a bathroom mirror, are bold, unflinching and open to readings both threatening and amusing, and in a 2018 series of drawings he builds figures and landscapes from accumulated tally marks that stand for the passage of time and the scars and memories it leaves.

Ashley has exhibited nationally and internationally for more than fifteen years, with solo exhibitions at Hinge Gallery in Chicago, Kavachnina Contemporary in Miami, the IUN Gallery for Contemporary Art, the Rockford Gallery for Contemporary Art and Aldo Castillo Gallery in Chicago, group exhibitions at the Rockford Art Museum, the Susquehanna Museum of Art, the Polish Museum of America, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, and fairs including Art Chicago, ArtMRKT, Art Hamptons, Art Miami and the Shanghai International Art Fair. He received a City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs grant in 2008 and was a featured artist of Chicago Artists Month in 2009. For years he was associate director of Chicago's Perimeter Gallery, whose display of painting, sculpture, ceramics and weaving together taught him to see all the arts as one. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Racine Art Museum and its Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts in Racine, Wisconsin, and in many private collections. He has lived in Chicago and Miami and now resides in Los Angeles.