ELAINE ASHBURN
530 West 25th Street, New York, NY
Sometimes neglecting household chores can lead to great things. It happened to New York digital artist Elaine Ashburn. Always forgetting to put her recycling out, Ashburn would end up at the Hastings-on-Hudson recycling center on Saturdays. There she found a treasure of quaint objects and furniture: old street lamps, antique velvet couches, or mannequins. Fascinated with this jumble of oddities, she started taking photographs–week after week–and manipulating them in Photoshop, to document the fleeting images that affect our everyday lives. Her collages are like lucid dreams in technicolor. Figures and objects float around in a stupor-like haze, as if appearing from the depth of our subconscious. Amidst flashes of light, eerie dolls, angel statues, and flickering candles, we dive into Ashburn’s spectacular visions, inebriated and almost hallucinated.
Ashburn graduated in Advertising Design from New York City College of Technology and took art classes at FIT and the School of Visual Arts. She participated in the MvVO Ad Art Show at the Oculus, inside the NY World Trade Center, and was a featured artist in the Hudson Independent, a local newspaper, which brought notice to her as a serious artist residing in the Hudson Valley. When not scavenging recycling centers, she works in advertising. Her resume includes companies such as Ogilvy, Grey, KBS+P, Saatchi & Saatchi, and FCB.
ELAINE ASHBURN ON
It all began at the recycling center in Hastings-on-Hudson. I noticed people leaving large objects—like old street lamps and antique velvet couches—outside the recycling bins. I was fascinated. To me they were beautiful objects that needed to be preserved. Since I couldn’t bring them home, I started taking pictures of everything I found: galoshes, angels, glass bottles, tattered tarot cards, and dusty jewelry. I was fixated and went back week after week for more.
I seemed to have developed an affinity for junk.
An advertising art director by trade, my Photoshop abilities were very good at the time, so I started making collages. Gradually, using my art school skills, the art history classes I snoozed through, and anything else I could conjure up, I discovered a pattern of interpretation and digital découpage was born.
I’m always on the lookout for the whimsical, the magical, the tarnished but beautiful, the poetic and painterly, the grasp of the obvious. An inspired day or a fleeting thought all blend into my mental mixmaster with a sprinkle of fantasy.
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ORIGINAL ELAINE ASHBURN ARTWORKS ON
530 West 25th Street, New York, NY 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380
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