Ashleigh Abbott (AERA) is a New York–based artist whose research-driven practice is a playful and rigorous exploration of material culture, juxtaposing the machinic with the organic and the modern with the ancient. Her work spans sculpture, installation, sound, new media, performance, and 3D printing, engaging with themes of sentimentality, radicalization, and the eco-psychological impacts of modern technologies. AERA’s practice is speculative, alchemical, sensorial, and somatic—exploring the fluidity of space and identity.
Statement
Ashleigh Abbott (AERA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her work is marked by coded investigations of sentimentality and radicalization, exploring topical issues that battle with screen addiction and hormonal surges that mix with fat-free, rootless, “made in the USA” narratives.
She wants to understand the effects of scientism, dogma, sexuality and cyborg lifestyle magazines on an already over taxed modern psyche. Creating new technologies with an eye towards ancient materials and process. She looks for the raw psychosocial play in the realm of the speculative, alchemical and somatic.
Since shifting from a protracted photographic practice, her selection of mediums have emerged through symbolic conceptual exploration; from a set of small sculptures made of the ashes of someplace she used to call home, to a salt and synthetic hair formed new-mythological figure, to braided repurposed clothing made into a beast that challenges epistemological dogmas woven into tradition. She has also used shiny glass rhinestones, the sound of rolling marbles, projected light Tex Avery wolves, and massive puppets to name a few.
AERA has been a fellow at The New School, for the 25 E 13th Gallery, and awarded the Covington Rhodes Prize and The BDC Award, among others. Her work has been shown at Gallery MC, the Aronson Gallery, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 25 East 13th Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, and in other national and international spaces through the United States, Spain, Bulgaria and Morocco.