Art Maze Magazine
Anniversary Ed., Issue 10
Cover: Julie Curtiss
Ashley Garrett. No Exit, 2015, oil on canvas, 48 x 49 in.
Ashley Garrett. Sossusvlei, 2016, oil on canvas, 50 x 54 in.
Full text:
”Ashley Garrett (b. 1984, Dover, NJ) is an artist living and working in New York City and East Chatham, New York. Her work draws upon her experience growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania raising animals and transforms the essence of being through abstract and figurative forms. Tracking a shifting psychological presence in the landscape, personal attachment and letting go of objects and animals, her paintings approach an understanding of human experience through the interaction with land and animals: their cultivation, development, and eventual (inevitable) loss. At times the subjects and figures in her paintings remain intact or preserved, and in others there is a foundation of objects or images while spaces fracture, spin out, and open up.
There is no exit from the ever-present landscape where we humans are located in space and time. Garrett's paintings are grounded in a close observation of land and all that lives and grows in it, real, remembered, imagined, and intuited. Dense organic forms emerge and become body while body becomes land revealing articulated moments of detail: organic matter small and hidden, large and imposing, unknowable yet intimate. Capturing organisms and space in simultaneous expressions of the phases of life cycles, Garrett's work questions the boundaries between what is "inside" and what is "outside" the self and the power of human feeling.
Ashley Garrett earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008. She has had many exhibitions nationally including New York City, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, CA, Dallas, TX, Saugerties, NY, West Hartford, CT, Great Barrington, MA, and Rhode Island. Her paintings on paper were included in 'Got it For Cheap 2017,' a traveling exhibition of works on paper making stops in the United States and abroad, including to venues in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, GA Austin, TX, Honolulu, HI, Greece, British Columbia, and Copenhagen. Her work has been reviewed in Painting is Dead, Gorky's Granddaughter and Arts in Bushwick among others.”