OVAC STUDENT AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE: Ashley Farrier and Kim Rice By Lauren Scarpello
As a rule, in art writing, we typically don’t review student work. But for this issue, I personally wanted to write about the 2015 OVAC Student Awards of Excellence winners. The Student Awards are presented in tandem with the Fellowship Awards and recognize two students annually who demonstrate unparalleled artistic vision with an honorarium of $500. There is something very pivotal about students who display such promise. When you’re in school, your existence is to experiment – adopt a certain ideology one day, and trade it in for a new one the next. You’re untethered – open and free to create, destroy, and create again. When you find that which speaks so powerfully, you have the time and space to follow it down the rabbit hole. Fresh out of that journey are two intrepid women with whom I recently had the pleasure to talk.
Ashley Farrier
I am standing in Ashley Farrier’s living room looking at a seven foot tall oil painting of her depicted as a queen. With a narrowed gaze, the ruler proudly holds her chin high, adorned with fur and a flowing blue gown, royal jewels, and a majestic staff. In her painting she is not the gentle and soft spoken artist, with wide eyes peering behind glasses, that I’ve come to know. Rather, we see a glowing, confident monarch, with radiating brown skin which seems to pop against the matte black acrylic background. Farrier says she derives her inspiration from past masters such as Caravaggio. This is clear with the dark, subdued mood, but instead of an ethereal chiaroscuro, most of her paintings are saturated with a rich palette, and a clear passion for her subjects. Created during the time surrounding her grandmother’s struggle with cancer and subsequent passing, Farrier developed her series, Royalty Not Lost, casting herself, her grandmother, and her sister in the roles of a fictional royal family from the past. There is a certain position of power an artist has when they reimagine their own image in their work. It is something art legends such as Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura have long known to be true. But in her depictions of herself and her family as African American royalty, Farrier does not necessarily aim to make any broad commentaries on society, gender, or race. In fact, Farrier’s musings are the result of youthful daydreams and the promise of a new history with the question of “what if?” What if there was a family of black royalty in the past? What were their lives like? Even so, with her stately and highly personal portraits, she may in fact find herself to be a bit of an accidental proselytizer. When I told her that her work was extremely timely considering the recent events surrounding race relations in America and asked her if that was her intention, her response was, “Sort of.” Farrier says she’s always been acutely aware of the fact that the history she learned in school never portrayed black history as particularly triumphant. She also noted that typical depictions of black people in art history usually involved a sense of caricature. These thoughts were definitely a factor in her work, albeit a side agenda. But as often is the case with audience interpretation, I had a much different experience.
Ashley Farrier, Your New Queen, 2014, Oil on Canvas, 80” x 59’
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We live in a society of oversaturation of the white image – and not just in media, but fine art included.