Bunker 2 from Doug Ashford on Vimeo.
First displayed in the exhibition In the Abstract at Mass MOCA, 2017 -_ (link); Bunker 2, (Clippings 1982 to 2016) was also presented as a solo presentation at Mission Gallery, Swansea, 2017 – (link) , and as part of First Person Plural at BAK, Utrecht, in 2018 _ (link)
This set of paintings originated from a collection of images cut and saved from various printed sources over a period of 25 years. They are part of an ongoing series of works that explore the connections between the specificity of human experience and the cosmic conditions of passing time. By marking the struggles that change society against the changing configurations of the stars, an understanding of any unique event is presented as affected by the assumption invested in the unchanging form of the night sky. Each media reproduction is from a particular date and digitally reprinted from its original source. The specific arrangement of the stars that would have been visible precisely on that date, are painted in oil below.
Over time, the stars are always shifting: first by visibly moving around the North star, and then in their mutual drift closer and farther away from each other over long, imperceptible periods time. Historical events and private memories are often felt as persistent but are in fact transfigured through interpretation and differing emphasis, faded by memory and rescaled by culture. The nocturnal sky, at least in our experience so far, is relentlessly ever-present – but astronomically speaking it is always new, unrepeatable.
Exhibition history:
BAK Center in Utrecht:_(link)
Photographs of Paintings Carried to Places where the Movement for Democracy in South Korea Happened, and Four Examples of what was Produced
A collection of photographs are hung on a wall, and in each image an individual holding a green rectilinear form is seen either standing or walking, idling or heading somewhere; presenting a painting to others. Unknown at the time, these green objects will be populated with different golden forms, yet to become visible as they are being photographed. Four examples of these paintings were then made in New York, and are presented here next to the photographs to produce an abstract narrative of what might have happened at these sites of democratic rebellion. In May 2016, Ashford visited Gwangju and Seoul; during that time he asked actors to present unfinished paintings to the sites of memorialization of the Uprising, to places of imprisonment and death, to where the movement for greater democratic representation still grows, and to the open-air street celebrations that happened before the anniversary of the event itself. It is only by thinking about politics and aesthetics together that, in Ashford’s own words, “a possibility of resistance can be found in an emotional connection to a history that is remade.”
Ashford would like to thank the following people who contributed time and effort to this project: In New York: Jaena Kwon, Won Cha, Simon Ko, Brianna Leatherbury, Christhian Diaz.  In Gwangju: Soyoung Park, Junsoon Song, Hanbyul Kim, Minkwan Choi, Heejoo Kim, Hyejoo Jeon, Ye-Ryung Lee, Ryueun Kim.  In Seoul: Minjung Jung, Seng Man Ko, Minkyung Kim, Yusun Jung, Hyunji Kwak, Eunice Koo, Kyudon Jang.
Commissioned for The 2016 Gwangju Biennial. View GB11 Installation here.
View GB catalogue here _(link)
View Edouard Glissant’s essay “For Opacity” here. _(link)
Historical images: _(link)
Doug Ashford’s Next Day, (2015-2016) depicts an emotional appraisal of the press coverage of the 9/11 attacks in the New York Times. The work consists of a reprinting of all 28 pages of the historic September 12th issue through the lens of colored, abstract patterns.
Each page is distributed as an individual print in an edition of 3 + 2 A/P:
Doug Ashford, Next Day (Pages A1-A28), 2015 – 2016
archival inkjet print on paper
image size: 56,5 x 34,3 cm (22 x 13 inch)
sheet size: 93,5 x 58,3 cm (37 x 23 inch)
Paper: Epson Hot Press Bright, 300 gr/m2
The whole series of 28 “pages” is distributed in a box in a limited edition of
5 + 2 A/P and in a different sheet size as the individual prints.
Doug Ashford, Next Day (New York Times, pages A1-A28), 2015-2016
28 archival inkjet prints on paper in an archival box
Image size: 55,8 x 34,2 cm (22 x 13 ¼ inch)
Sheet size: 68,6 x 46,4 cm (27 x 18 ¼ inch)
Exhibition history:
The whole series of Next Day is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
– James Cohan Gallery, New York, All Watched Over curated by Tina Kukielski with 7 different pages of Next Day. 25.6.2015 – 7.8.2015
– Martin Janda Gallery, Vienna, The * of Love curated by_Joe Scanlan with 7 different pages of Next Day. 11.09.2015 – 31.10.2015
– Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam, Next Day I and Next Day II, with 15 different pages. 14.11.2015 – 3.4.2016
– Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam at Independent Art Fair, Brussels with the whole series of 28 pages of Next Day from 20.04.2016 – 23.4.2016
– Mary Boone Gallery New York, Life of Forms curated by Piper Marshall, with the whole series of 28 pages of Next Day. 28.4.2016 – 29.07.2016
– Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem (US), Dispatches curated by Cora Fisher with the whole series of 28 pages of Next Day. 01.11.2016 -19.2.2016
– Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, First Exhibition, 24.09.2016 – 15.10.2016
– P!, New York (US), THE STAND, 13.01.2017 – 26.02.2017
– Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York at Independent New York with the whole series of Next Day. 02.03.2017 – 05.03.2017
– FLAG Art Foundation, New York (US), The Times, with 4 pages 01.06.2017 – 11.08.2017
– MoCA Cleveland (US), A Poethical Wager with the whole series of 28 pages of Next Day 07.10.2017 – 28.01.2018
– Stedelijk Base, Collection presentation Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with the whole series of 28 pages 01.06.2020
Performed for “A riot is the language of the unheard”: an exercise in unrestrained speech. Organized by Steven Lam.Performed at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in conjunction with Ruptures: Forms of Public Address
Exhibition description at Cooper Union website_(link)
Six Paintings and One Photo from Saturday, June 25, 2005.
Exhibition history:
PEANA Projects Gallery, “Common Forms.” Monterray, MX. 6 September – 6 November, 2018. [organized by Owen Duffy]
Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY. “sorry, I’ve been trying to teach a peacock how to act.” 19 April -31 May, 2015. [organized by Pam Lins]
Bureau Publik, (now dissolved) Copenhagen, DK. 15 March – 26 April, 2014. [Solo Exhibition]
The work is built from two rolls of found film with images of a white American family and their friends in a suburban environment. In some of the photographs the daily life of the family is interrupted from its normality by the appearance of a Nazi swastika. The origin of the film is most likely the city Bakersfield in California.
Between the 1890’s and 1960’s the sense of normality occupied by those living in white privilege, shifted from stable supremacist legal definitions and territories backed by state violence to more psychological and mythological positions of violent projection and fantasy. The hyperbolic scale of this brutality is still felt on many levels in the United States, hidden and dark as the muddy mold on a flag left in the attic, rotten and constantly growing through the reproduction of whiteness as an affiliation with death.
I respond through abstract tempera paintings, a selected printing of the two film rolls, in an installation with disrupted glass panels. Hereby creating a context for an emotional appraisal of an aspect of American culture, one that is rarely self-described, because to do so would demand defining the core as founded in racism.
Featured in 2016 at Wilfred Lentz Gallery, 2015. View Installation here.
Also presented at Robert Miller Gallery ++++++
And The Vienna Biennial +++++
Forma Corporis, Inkjet Print, 2010
Exhibition history:
dOCUMENTA 13, “Many Readers of One Event,” Kassel, DE [organized by Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev]_(link)
The Centre for Contemporary Art, “TOGETHER/APART,” Ujadowski Castle, Warsaw, PL
Whitechapel Gallery, “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015,” London, UK_(link)
MASS MOCA, “In the Abstract,” North Adams, MA [organized by Susan Cross] _(link)
and at Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam _(link)
The Ordinary and Three of its Products, 2010. One painting tempera on wood 35,6 x 31 cm three smaller paintings tempera on wood, each 25,4 x 25,4 cm.
Exhibition history:
Abstract Possible: The Trailer. Malmo Kunstalle:_(link)
Sharjah Biennial, 2011_(link)
and at Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam:_(link)
Used as cover image for Documents of Contemporary Art: Abstraction, Maria Lind, ed._(link)
The Ordinary and Three of its Products, (Matrix)Â Tempera on Wood, 2010
Installed at Sharjah Biennial
Vienna, 2010. (tempera on board) 10″ sq each panel.
Six Moments in 1967 and Some of its Bodies,
2010-2011
