DOUG ASHFORD
b. 1958, Rabat, Morocco; lives in Brooklyn, NY
Known for his teaching and writing as well as his art practice, Doug Ashford was a member of the artists collaborative Group Material, whose projects in the 1980s and ’90s were concerned with reimagining the exhibition as a place for dialogue, social change, and public interaction. Over the last decade, Ashford has turned to painting, combining images sourced from the news with abstract forms and color that the artist proposes as a reservoir for individual and shared emotions. Ashford sees these communal sensations as an instrument for political change. With his installation Many Readers of One Event (2012), Ashford presents a collection of geometric abstractions in tandem with photographs of people collapsing into one another. The images reenact an original news photo featuring grieving parents falling into one another’s arms after the death of their children. With his paintings, Ashford offers a similar interaction or connection without a specific referent, and space beyond the prescribed images and ideologies that society presents to us.
In two new series of works on canvas, Ashford once again combines documents from his personal archives, including news clippings of tragic events, with abstract compositions—some of which suggest abstracted writing derived from the “heavenly writing” of fifthcentury Daoism. Ashford creates pairs of images as if they mirror—or translate—one another, that is, abstract image and what could be considered manufactured reality. A new video animation, Bunker 2 (2017), intersperses news clippings dating from 1982 to 2016 with bands of changing color. The barrage of images and the black metal that accompanies them presents an overwhelming concurrence of fact and feeling. As images blend into one another, and the aesthetic connection to color allows intuition to take over, the work suggests the possibility that our emotions can resist the culture of publicity and reshape notions of progress.
Many Readers of One Event, 2012 Tempera paintings and photographs on wood on shelf and wall; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam