Installation – Doug Ashford

Many Readers of One Event. Installed as part of dOCUMNETA 13, Kassel, DE. 9 June 2012 – 16 September 2013

From Ashford’s correspondence with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: “A theater for re-organization suggests a distinction between the emotions that are designed for us by the world of power and domination, and new feelings that can be built independently. After all, we are overflowing with the obscurities of memory, the stunning mis-recognitions they produce, our exchanges with one another; their use of ourselves by others, and then the use of ourselves by our selves, our dreams of our helplessness recognized with others.”

From the dOCUMNETA 13 guidebook: “Doug Ashford’s earlier visual practice was primarily connected to the artist’ collaborative Group Material, which from 1982 to 1996, produced over forty exhibitions and public projects internationally. Combining factual information, mass media, and artifacts from popular culture with ‘recognized art.’ Group Material developed the exhibition form into an artistic medium, using display design and curatorial juxtaposition as a critical place for communication, inviting audiences to imagine radically democratic forms. The group’s projects, include Democracy: Education (1988), where the work of students, activists, public school teachers and recognized artists were presented as a unified movement, and AIDS Timeline (1991), an extensive research project that mapped the development of AIDS from the medical epidemic into the social crisis produced by medical, political and cultural indifference.

A teacher, artist and writer, Ashford’s individual practice is diverse and syncretic at once, coming from a position of utopian repose. His production of discrete paintings might seem to be at odds with the discursively motivated exhibition; but for Ashford, the duality between art-making as an autonomous occupation based in affect and contemplation on one hand, and as an ethical pathway leading to social critique on the other, is fundamentally misunderstood if seen as a contradiction.

“For dOCUMENTA (13) Ashford exhibits a series of small-scale abstract paintings in a prefabricated house in the Karlsaue, inspired by associative modernist historicisms that rephrase institutional memory, such as Aby Warburg’s Memory Atlas (1929), or Andre Malraux’s Imaginary Museum (1950). AshfordÂ has collected multiple images over the years that depict groups of figures in states of emergency and helplessness. Pasted onto and hung alongside tempera painted wooden panels, these semi-abstractions suggest a discontinuous aesthetic path through past histories and into empathies that could occupy the present. By painting against a document, the depicted truths of a photograph take on multiple stories in their altered recognitions – creating a rostrum where forms and facts can replace one another in the mind of the speaker. This chance for formal organization suggests a distinction between the emotions that are designed for us by the world of power and domination, and new feelings that can be built autonomously to provide openings for action. Doug Ashford, geb./b. 1958 in Rabat (Marokko/Morocco), lebt / lives in New York. ”

documenta 13 original website_(link)

documenta 13 Archive site_(link)

Original proposal to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev_(link)

dOCUMENTA 13

Bunker 2, (Clippings 1982 to 2016). Mission Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK. 30 Sept – 11 Nov, 2017. {HD Video Installation with sound, 6:00}

From the press release: “Mission Gallery is delighted to present the work of Brooklyn based artist, Doug Ashford, in his first solo exhibition in Wales, delivered in partnership with Swansea International Festival.

This new video animation intersperses news clippings dated from 1982 to 2016 with bands of changing colour. 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 colour allows intuition to take over, the work suggest the possibility that our emotions can resist the culture of publicity and reshape notions of progress.

Bunker 2 was first shown in May 2017 at MASS MoCA’s In the Abstract exhibition, which brought together a diverse, multi generational group of artists whose works represented a potent and muscular approach to contemporary abstraction. Doug Ashford is an artist, teacher and writer based in New York. He is Associate Professor at The Cooper Union where he has taught sculpture, design, and interdisciplinary studies since 1989. He is represented by Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam. Private View + Live Musical Response from ‘People and Other Diseases, 6pm – 8pm – Friday 29th September.”

Bunker 2 on Vimeo: _ (link)

Mission Gallery website:_ (link)

Swansea Fringe Festival website: _ (link)

Bunker 2

All My Love, CIA Remembered, 1952-1987, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, DE

These paintings consider an association between historical experiences of social corruption and how they effect personal reflection. Rationalizations of political life are often distorted by undefined beliefs, superstitions and habits. Here, the unsettled shape of trauma is presented as an expelled, ectoplasmic, abstraction. As the facts of participation in social reproduction are rendered through an accounting of memory, shapes might be rendered. The past becomes a complex theatre of references that includes the present, where shapes can take the place of actors as in a tableau vivant, seemingly arbitrary, but designed in a symptomatic corollary to the relief of guilt. By picturing a formal extremity alongside the archival document, the facts in a life’s history can be understood as always re-rendered, between the dark and the light, suggesting the chance for redemption caught outside of any distinct form.

The installation consists of seven works:

- - - - Doug Ashford, All my Love #1 (cloud), 2017.
        
        Doug Ashford, All my Love #2 (stain), 2017.
        
        Doug Ashford, All my Love #3 (crater), 2017.
        
        Doug Ashford, All my Love #4 (slipper), 2017.
        
        Doug Ashford, All my Love #5 (tree), 2017.
        
        Doug Ashford, All my Love #6 (spiral), 2017.

Oil paint and paper carbon transfer on canvas. 24 x 14″ each panel [Courtesy Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam.]

Text development as pdf _(link)

Project for publication _(link)

Cold War paintings, 2018

Photographs of Paintings Carried to Places where the Movement forÂ Democracy in South Korea Happened, and Four Examples of what was Produced, 2016, Gwangju Biennale 11, Commission. Gesso w/porcelain, egg tempera, and gold leaf on wood, hardware, photographs, (dimensions variable); each painted panel: 18″h x 19″w; each photograph 9″h x 9.5″w

From Gwangju Biennale’s publicity Ashford’s proposal: “A collection of photographs are hung on the 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.

This project originated amongst the plethora of remembrance monuments in Gwangju, Korea, all dedicated to the rebellions against the state during the “Gwangju Uprising” of May 18 to May 27, 1980. Most cities have experienced similar revolutions, and in most cases, the power of the state and its subjugation of popular will has survived intact. In New York City, hundreds died during the labor rights rebellions at the end of the 19th century. Huge armories remain that housed the federal troops brought to control these insurgencies. Still, no memorial monuments exist to mark the workers who fought and died for greater civil rights and inclusion in society’s production.

Public memorials often coincide comfortably with state power’s ongoing apparatus, its daily oppressions, and its maintenance of inequality. To be in Gwangju today is to be continuously reminded of the possibilities of democracy, which makes feelings of solidarity in past human actions and sacrifice inevitable. When trauma becomes a monument, the dominant culture can incorporate sympathy with rebellion into passive forms of state control. It is as if we make monuments to history to forget the impact of that history on the present.

Artworks have been used throughout history to affect social life, either by elevating the unknown and subaltern into consciousness or by exposing the machinations of political oppression in newly felt ways. Between the 9th and 14th centuries, many Europeans physically carried painted icons of saints into military battles to affect the course of history.

In this project, rather than have a painted icon transform an event by exporting its supernatural power out upon a social conflict, I wanted to see if the context of remembrance and empathy for past catastrophes could push back onto the works of art that I bring to the site of conflict. I welcomed the Gwangju Uprising sites to change the outcome by asking residents to hold “unfinished” paintings in front of the many physical confrontation and brutality places in Gwangju and Seoul between government forces and Korean citizens. Some sites are officially marked, while others are entirely forgotten, but all of these places were where living people tried to change society. I proposed that those living and dead bring historical residue, and in occupying these places, they could somehow leave marks in gold, white, and blue on painted surfaces.

The paintings became finished by carrying them through the streets of cities, seemingly reversing the actions that happened before the work and I arrived. I wanted to produce a break in the traditional connection between civil disobedience and history’s formal markings, a proposition of magical reversal showing that we are still alive.”

View the GB11 catalogue here _(link)

View select photographs from the series here _(link)

I would like to thank the following people who contributed time and effort to this project: Sam Ashford. Christhian Diaz, and Brianna Leatherbury for pre-production work. Min Kyung Kim, for installation, translating my lecture, and making my time in Korea incredible overall. Jaena Kwon, Won Cha,and Simon Ko in New York and Seoul, for coordinating and finding actors. Eunice Koo, Kyudon Jang, Mingjung Jung, Yusun Jung, Hyeonah Kim, Hyunji Kwak, and Seng Man Ko as actors in Seoul. Soyoung Park, Hanbyul Kim, Minkwan Choi, Heejoo Kim, Hyejoo Jun, Ye-ryung Lee, Ryueun Kim, and Junsoo Song as actors in Gwangju. Soyoung Park, for radio interview, translation, walking, and beautiful reflection.

For more historical information on the Gwangju Uprising see _ http://timshorrock.com/documents/korea-the-cherokee-files-part-one/

Gwangju Biennial 11, 2016.

Next Day installed at MoCA Cleveland Cleveland, OH, for “A Poet*hical Wager,” curated by Andria Hickey. 7 October 2017 – 28 January 2018

“The exhibition is developed through conversations with artists and seems especially timely given the increasingly complex relationship we have with world events that are both affecting and divorced from personal experience. Looking at abstraction as a form of response suggests a different way of working, and a different way of thinking about the affective power of art today.” – Andria Hickey

Artists include, Doug Ashford (b. 1958, Rabat, MA); Abbas AkhavanÂ (b. 1977, Tehran, IR); Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico City, MX); Lara Favaretto (b. 1973, Treviso, Italy); Iman IssaÂ (b. 1979, Cairo, EG); Rashid JohnsonÂ (b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois); Jumana Manna (b. 1987, Princeton, NJ); Oscar Murillo (b.1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia), Tariku Shiferaw (b.1983, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia); and Mario Garcia Torres (b. 1975, Monclova, Mexico), Emanuel Tovar (b. 1974, Guadalajara, Mexico).

Museum website _(link)

Gallery guide essay by Andria Hickey_(link)

Essay by Ashford for unpublished catalogue_(link)

MOCA Cleveland

First Person Plural: Empathy, Intimacy, Irony and Anger. BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), Utrecht, NL. 12 May – 22 July, 2018

The group exhibition First Person Plural: Empathy, Intimacy, Irony, and Anger inquires into the emotional infrastructures of the present. What roles do emotions and affects play in forming collectivities and political belonging? What kind of “we’s” do empathy, intimacy, irony, and anger assemble, and how do they determine which “first person plurals” someone is part of? And where does the affective power of art stand in these processes?

The exhibition considers these questions along contemporary political, economic, technological, and social challenges””including the alarming surfacing of fascisms in public life. Pondering the emotional as an organizing force across political spectrums, emotions are understood not as individual mental states but as collective material and affective practices that are both shaped by and shape social life. The works in the exhibition challenge the familiar, divisive narratives of a “we,” such as the nation and the so-called “refugee crisis,” and allude to emotions as entry points for manipulation.

The exhibition features works by artists Doug Ashford, Sven Augustijnen, Tala Madani, Liz Magic Laser, Eva and Franco Mattes, Otobong Nkanga, and Sarah Vanhee, as well as a library space conceived by 2017/2018 BAK Fellow Sepake Angiama. Titled “We Summon Here All Beings Present, Past & Future,” this space features books, films, audio pieces, and posters, as well as a series of public workshops to activate them.

Curated by Matteo Lucchetti_(link)

As part of “Propositions for Non-Fascist Living” _ (link)

Exhibition website: _Â (link)

First Person Plural, BAK Utrecht

In the Abstract. MassMOCA, North Adams, MA, US. 30 May 2017 – 9 April 2018.

From exhibition pamphlet: “Known for his teaching and writing as well as his art practice, Doug Ashford (b. 1958, Rabat, Morocco) 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.Â 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 re-enact an original news photo featuring grieving parents collapsing into one another after the tragic death of their children. With his paintings, Ashford proposes 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 news clippings and other documents with abstract compositions ““ some of which suggest abstracted writing. Ashford creates pairs of images as if they mirror ““ or translate – one another.Â A new video animation, Bunker 2 (2017), intersperses news clippings dating between 1982 and 2016 with bands of changing color. The barrage of images and the rock music that accompanies them presents an overwhelming concurrence of fact and feeling.Â As the flow of 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.”

Curated by Susan Cross _(link)

Exhibition website:_(link)

Exhibition press release:_ (link)

In the Abstract, MASS MoCA, 2016

Dispatches: Live News Through Art.Â The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, US. 1 November 2016 – February 19 2017

From the exhibition website:

DispatchesÂ gathers and generates artistic responses to the news by 34 contemporary artists and photojournalists. The exhibition includes a survey of works from 2010 – present and launches a series of commissions, or “dispatches” on current events and the critical issues of our time.

The art works emerge from within and in defiance of today’s media landscape, ranging from real-time coverage to deliberately slow and analog forms. They enlarge our collective capacity to sensitively receive stories delivered in today’s unevenly regulated and fast flow of news. They decelerate the speed of information. Or, they organize collective efforts toward a more humanizing interaction.

The Dispatches public program features artist talks and live performances. Partnerships with Universities and a blog mentorship initiative with student Millennials will appear in the new media landscape that is the show’s defining context.An exhibition is a forum””one of the few public commons designed to cultivate our ethical and civic capacities to grapple with what is happening in our world. Dispatches invites you to enliven this forum and say something.Â

Artists and Collectives: Doug Ashford, Rossella Biscotti, Sayler/Morris (The Canary Project), Mel Chin, Damon Davis, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, Hasan Elahi, For Freedoms, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Stacey L. Kirby, Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG), !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Sheryl Oring, Trevor Paglen, Larry C. Price, Dread Scott, Chloe Bass + George Scheer,Â and iO Tillett Wright. VII Photo Agency: Ashley Gilbertson, Ron Haviv, Tomas van Houtryve, Ed Kashi, Sarker Protick, Maciek Nabrdalik, Sim Chi Yin,Â and Danny Wilcox Frazier.

Curated by Cora Fisher_ (link)

Exhibition website: _(link)

Next Day, SECCA, 2016.

Future Light: Escaping Transparency. As part of theVienna Biennial. MAK Exhibition Hall, MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, AT. 11 June 2014 – 4 May 2015

Statement by Maria Lind in exhbition brochure: “There is a widespread belief today that light will do away with ignorance, the abuse of power, and inequality. This trust in light is not unlike how “enlightening” operated during the old Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, shedding light on dark corners and getting rid of unawareness, mysticism, and other unruly phenomena. In both cases it is a penetrating light that creates transparency and visibility. Today it is put in practice as the light of surveillance, communication, and speculation. Transparency has even gone a few steps further nowadays and has come to be seen as a guarantor of many things, including accountability and trust, and by extension the free market and the stability of the capitalist system itself. The scholar Clare Birchall calls this “the contemporary transparency assemblage.” She argues that today transparency, through “the fervour for light,” has even become a pan-ideological democratic value that no one can afford to question.

At the same time, light that creates reflections, abstraction, opacity, and shadow abounds in contemporary art. Some of it has migrated into Escaping Transparency in the expansive exhibition space at the MAK. This light is non-transparent, it is refracted and operates obliquely. It is relational light, a sort of trickster light, it is light that goes on and off. It is light as a carrier of commercial messages but also more obscure indications as to when and how something is visible and not. It is the light of reflection and endless reproduction in a condition where beingvisible is considered equal to being or to existing at all.

Perhaps Birchall is right when he says that each era gets the transparency it deserves. It is unclear what that will mean when, in the future, life is more likely to occur on planets with two small suns creating a saturated photosynthesis that makes vegetation black. For now it might be the moment to exchange the “right to privacy” for “the right to opacity.” We remember Eduard Glissant’s powerful call for the latter, which arose from colonial subjects’ refusal to be totally knowable and therefore able to be controlled by the colonizers. Here opacity is not the same as obscurity but simply that which cannot be reduced and contained.

Participating Artists Pablo Accinelli (Buenos Aires), Doug Ashford (New York), Claire Barclay (Glasgow), Rana Begum (London), Elena Damiani (Lima/Copenhagen), Shezad Dawood (London), Annika Eriksson (Stockholm/Berlin), Matias Faldbakken (Oslo), Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (Tehran), Ane Hjort Guttu (Oslo), Tom Holert (Berlin), Philippe Parreno (Paris), Amalia Pica (Buenos Aires/London), Bik Van der Pol (Rotterdam), Yelena Popova (Moscow/Nottingham), Walid Raad (Beirut/New York), Haegue Yang (Seoul/Berlin)

Curated by Maria Lind

Exhibition info at mak.at

Future Light, MAK, 2016.

Bakersfield, CA (Series), 2013-2015

From a talk given in Rotterdam:

“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 normalityÂ occupiedÂ by those living in white privilege, shifted from stable supremacist legal definitions and territories backed by state violence to more psychological andÂ mythologicalÂ positions of violent projection and fantasy. The hyperbolic scale of this brutality is still felt onÂ manyÂ 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 responded through abstract tempera paintings, a selected printing of the two film rolls, in an installation with disrupted glass panels. Thereby 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.”

View individual works from series _(link)

Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam exhibition website _(link)

Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam press release _(link)

Bakersfield, CA Series, 2013-2015. Wilfried Lentz Gallery 2016.

Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015. WhiteChapel Gallery, London, GB. 15 January – 6 April 2015. Curated by Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, and Magnus af Petersens, Curator at large.

From a review by Sarah K. Rich in Artforum, April 2015: “The antecedent for Ashford’s 2012 Many Readers of One Event installation was a New York Times report on the death of three boys who suffocated in the trunk of a car just yards away from where family members and police had been searching. Ashford reproduces the story’s main photograph, which portrays a father collapsed in someone’s arms in despair, and tucks it between two small panels that he’s painted in overlapping planes of color. Among similar paintings installed nearby hang photographs of different couples reenacting this collapse as captured by the mass media. (…) As abstract panels sometimes cover, protect, or hover on the walls near the photographs, the compositional elements within the panels become increasingly legible according to the features of human interaction – touch, intersection, transparency, concealment. As planes overlap and people embrace (and in the embracing try to imagine what other people must have once experienced), the images search for the places where connections between people and things might be thinkable. Without making hubristic claims to geometry’s universal legibility, but still relying on abstraction’s capacity to signify desire for cultural universality, Ashford’s installation contemplates a longing for (and impediments to) human interaction through empathy. The term was once posited as abstraction’s opposite, but in Ashford’s practice, and in this exhibition’s finest moments, it is a sought-after companion that might still guide painting into new realms of the social.”

Complete review in Artforum, April 2015:_(link)

Documents of Contemporary Art: Abstraction, Maria Lind, ed._(link)

Whitechapel Gallery website _(link)

Catalogue _(link)

Adventures of the Black Square, Whitechapel, 2015.

All Watched Over, James Cohan Gallery, NYC, June 25th – August 7th, 2015

“All Watched Over”Â A group exhibition byTina Kukielski at James Cohan Gallery entitledÂ All Watched Over.Â Other artists in the show were: Doug Ashford, Shannon Ebner, Iman Issa, Josh Kline, KRIWET, Paul Laffoley, Margaret Lee, Nonggirrnga Marawili, Lee Mullican, Brenna Murphy, Michael Portnoy, Michael Riedel, Gabriel Sierra, and Roman Å tÄ›tina

From the press release:

“Richard Brautigan’s poemÂ All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, written in 1967 while he was poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology, anticipates an ecosystem where animal, human, and machine live in harmony with nature. Freed from the constraints of labor and balanced by cybernetic feedback mechanisms that regulate and sustain life, the humans in Brautigan’s short poem flourish in a naturalistic techno-utopia.

With the promise of a cybernetic techno-utopia as its backdrop, this exhibition brings together a group of artists who apply systems to and in their work. Across a diversity of practices and cultures, the dominant theme inÂ All Watched OverÂ is art in the form of information processing and its diagramming. Set against today’s data-processed landscape, the artworks inÂ All Watched OverÂ transform data into hidden messages, unifying theories, complex diagrams, and personal or cultural cosmologies. As such, subjects of encoding and encryption percolate in a number of works on view; they manifest as algorithmic or systemic codes on the one hand, and through abstraction and the optical experience of language on the other.”

Curated by Tina Kukielski_(link)

Link to James Cohan’s exhibition website

All Watched Over, James Cohan Gallery

EMINENT DOMAINS (proper names), Robert Miller Gallery, 6 March – 11 April, 2015. NYC

A group exhibition organized by gallery artistÂ Willem Oorebeek, featuring works by Doug Ashford, Aglaia Konrad, and Glen Rubsamen.

EMINENT DOMAINS (proper names) addresses the mechanisms and hierarchies of the art world: absence, eminence, and protÃ©gÃ©s, all of which are inclusive in the enterprise of presentation. The exhibition titles broadly refer to the infinite perspectives from which we look at art. The traditional gallery space has been described as a hermetic space, within which the art viewing experience may be controlled to a degree. Oorebeek endeavors in his curatorial exercise to allow the participant to (or not to) engage with the art in a potentially open structure without being separated by (white) space that isolates the works from each other. Oorebeek describes the domain as the space where art is happening, as well as the space occupied by the act of its making. Within the context of this exhibition, eminence is fundamentally generated by the artist’s activity ““ awareness, intention, and gesture ““ and is not based on the (external) judgments of its reception in the art world.

Curated by Willem Oorebeek_(link)

Exhibition website_(link)

Robert Miller Gallery

The Problem Today is Not the Other but the Self, Feb. 22 – Apr. 5, 2015. LUDLOW 38/Goethe Institut, NYC

The problem today is not the other but the selfÂ is concerned with questions arising from the increasing neoliberalization of society and digitalization of communication. Both processes thrive on our belief in individual freedom and are products as well as engines for political agendas and a free market economy. Yet, instead of a boundless surge in freedom, we are currently witnessing a crisis in our subjective experience of freedom. Chronic depression, excessive demands on our sensory perception, and burnout syndrome are some of the consequences of this development.

The exhibition title is based on the essays of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in which he describes our constant striving for freedom and self-realization as a social constraint. According to Han, virtual self-marketing has become a form of self-exploitation and, in the process, the “disciplinary society” that philosopher Michel FoucaultÂ described in 1975 has transitioned into a “society of self-discipline.” In this system, an individual’s opponent is no longer “the other,”””the individuals themselves have transformed into their own enemies.

The problem today is not the other but the selfÂ thus gathers six artists of different generations whose works reflect on the themes of freedom, powerlessness, and neoliberalism. Andy Coolquitt creates expansive installations of found materials and objects, which he calls “somebody-mades” and “in-betweens.” He arranges these mostly discarded and forgotten objects in site-specific compositions that redefine spaces and pathways. The works of Doug AshfordÂ combine painterly abstraction with political intention in a constant search for the origins of empathy. His videoÂ Untitled FilmÂ (2013) shows””in slow motion””pornographic scenes where the explicit material is overlaid with fields of color. The wall worksÂ Madison Street,Â Jefferson Ave, andÂ Halsey StreetÂ (2013) by Lena HenkeÂ are casts of facade structures from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her works reflect urban development concepts, urban design, and “third places” as snapshots of a time when self-initiative and self-responsibility embodied hope for a better future. Flaka Haliti’s small series of drawingsÂ Hoods Requared Beyond This PointÂ (2013) stylizes our life trajectory as a loop between failure and success. The site-specific installationÂ Expression ManagementÂ (2015) by the artist duoÂ James Gregory Atkinson & Helen Demisch refers to the logic of surveillance and self-imposed transparency in contemporary society. The work takes on the prevalence of theÂ selfie and connects this phenomenon with the screening and scanning methods of public facilities.

Exhibition website_(link)

View on Vimeo_(link)

WebsiteÂ for theÂ LUDLOW 38 Goethe Institute Archive_(link)

Curated by Vivien Trommer_(link)

Doug Ashford in conversation with Vivien Trommer for KubaParisÂ website_(link) Download interview:_(link)

The Problem Today is Not the Other but the Self, 2015

Six Paintings and One Photo from Saturday, June 25, 2005. Installed at bureau publik, (now dissolved) Copenhagen, DK. 15 March – 26 April, 2014.

For his exhibition at bureau publik, Doug Ashford presents a new series of works, which considerÂ howÂ modern notionsÂ of re-makingÂ the self and the body,Â puts all of us always already into a disaster.Â WhileÂ working with this series of tempera paintings, Ashford repeated one composition, as ifÂ reformingÂ one world six times. Imbedded in them is a photo of a flood survivor pausing in retreat from the oncoming waters.

Ashford was part of the New York-based collective Group Material and his own artistic practice is based on of the conviction prevalent in the group’s projects that the presentation of art is a political event. In recent years he has been working with an abstract language in the medium of painting in order to explore abstraction as an agent for social change. Abstraction can be seen as a withdrawal, retreat and rejection of the given rules, which can open up for new worlds to be imagined and this is where the transformative potential of abstraction is located. In this sense, abstraction contains a promise of reconfiguring the possible.

This promise is not only about change on a large scale. It also has to do with the experience of our own individual lives. As Ashford has put it in 2009: “After all the thinking and writing on how abstractionÂ relatesÂ to social change, I have realized thatÂ one truth is that I began to make abstract paintings simply because I like the way they look. They look like the failures of my life re-illuminated.”

Curated by Katarina Stenbeck and Johanne LÃ¸gstrup

Ashford’s artists statement for press release_(link)

Bureau Publik install

“Bakersfield CA” – installation for Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, 2014

Henie Onstad Kunstsenter

Exhibition Details – Grazer

Doug Ashford. Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, AU. 21 September – 24 November, 2013.

From the publicity material: “Coming from a background of a socially engaged art practice in the 80’s and 90’s as part of the New York based art collective Group Material (1982 – 1996), artist Doug Ashford (b. 1958, New York) took up painting in earnest after the collective ended. In the early public projects of Group Material, the art exhibition form itself was challenged for its social and participatory purposes, thereby contesting the terrain of political life. Ashford’s current body of work focuses on the consoling role of the artwork itself by depicting foremost tragic events, as well as political ones, through schematic abstract paintings. The forms that manifest themselves in this working process start, for example, with newspaper clippings of political manifestations, often chosen for both their factual reportage and imagistic drift. The protagonists in these moments of strong social upheaval have an aesthetic stance while responding to an emergency; moving as if empathy has taken them into a momentum that overcomes catastrophe. Ashford abstracts the scenarios through cropping and colored schemas, each analyzing the event on a more metaphorical and formal level.

The Grazer Kunstverein presents the first institutional solo show of Doug Ashford by exhibiting an overview of the artist’s way of working and thinking, starting with the late 80’s as of part of the collective “˜Group Material’ to more recent work, which is mostly embedded in painting.

Ashford is also known as scholar and writer and therefore the Grazer Kunstverein has produced, in collaboration with Mousse Publishing, a publication that is dedicated to a selection of his writings and conversations, which mostly analyze and discuss the collective and the social in art.”

– Krist Gruijthuijsen, Director

Exhibition page at Grazer Kunstverein _(link)

Selections from Doug Ashford: Writing and Conversations, Gruijthuijsen, Krist, ed. Mousse Press and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz and Milan, 2013. _(link)

Notice at Contemporary Art Daily_(link)

Grazer Kunstverein ““ Solo Exhibtion

Sharjah Biennial 10: Plot for a Biennial. Sharjah, UAE, March 16 – May 16 2011.

Excerpt from the catalogue, Doug Ashford with Lisa Larson-Walker. October 13, 2008

DA: Can I look at the questions?

LLW: Yeah you can look at the questions. I asked these first ones, you know, not as a joke: how does art function politically? What is activist art? What forms of dissent are possible today? And how do artists manifest political perspectives within their art practice? I feel like I figured out what you are going to talk a lot about in your lecture next week.

DA: I would like to look beyond the possible, what’s allowed in the realm of the political to move audiences beyond history, dealing with social facts as part of our imaginations. I know that’s very broad in terms of your first question: “˜How does art function politically?’ But my answer could be: Art always functions politically. All culture happens for a reason, and all the ways that art moves us privately and socially is arranged, not dictated, but arranged through interactions with power. But meanwhile the danger lies in declaring a solely ethical value system for art.

LLW: So the artist as a social activist has become a decorative in relation to its support? Maybe that is why social action becomes formulaic. Can you comment on how institutional support can often be detrimental, possibly because it creates a kind of pattern of acceptable critique which functions only within specific parameters?

DA: I will always defend the beauty of community rebellion and social reorganization that collaboratively expresses the potential of our constituencies: artists, citizens, workers. That problematic image today is that of the artist, supported by institutions, that goes into communities and presents her or himself as a mediagenic figure who can depict, focus or worst of all, empower communities to become represented. Many artists that were invested in community-based art practices in the early nineties saw the relationship between the social and the aesthetic as a terrain of great interest. The fact that our work was instrumentalized and became a servicing tool to uneven urban development and corporate finance perhaps should not have been the revelation that it appeared to be at the time.

LLW: Yes and within that there is the question of the independence of ego from cultural capital perhaps, as in, when someone gets funding, the importance of them being a recognizable name or recognizable marker of progressive political thought. I don’t want to get sensational and say “˜washing away the sins of capitalism’ by making a gesture within the confines of accepted discourse”¦

DA: The idea of the institution as redeemer, or the idea of redemption coming from a figure of power, seems to be growing in the discourse around socially motivated art practices. Group Material was always extremely suspicious of this, because we always thought of ourselves as part of the audience. If you think of yourself as part of the audience, the idea of the redemptive capacity of the artist to save someone else seems a bit absurd.Â Aesthetic inquiry only produces virtue when it can refuse to be used for an existing idea of “the good”. Many of these formal assumptions remain unexamined for their artistic value or interest, and instead remain anchored in virtue. Meanwhile, forms dealing with affect, desire and other contexts for the positive rupture of subjection are being dismissed as “anti-social”. I am wondering about an art thatÂ can help us understand thatÂ we’re broken and can’t be ourselves anymore, and that can disenfranchise the self from the world’s expectations.

LLW: So you feel that beauty is a necessary part of social mobilization or even of revolution?

Curated by Suzanne Cotter, Rasha Salti and Haig Aivazian

Biennial 10 website_(link)

Haig Aivazian_(link)

Sharjah Biennial

Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take, Museo Tamayo. Mexico City, MX. 25 MarchÂ – 28 August, 2011. [curated by Maria Lind]

From the press release: “The second iteration of the ambitious multi-venue project Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take, conceived by Stockholm-based curator Maria Lind, is presented as part of the series Minor Histories Larger Worlds, which, from the perspective of contemporary art, gathers and reevaluates moments, ideas, characters and works from the past that have been placed at the margin or left outside of the official narratives of History. Within this context, the group show Abstract Possible reconsiders certain crucial aspects of the phenomena of abstraction as manifested in contemporary art. The works in Abstract PossibleÂ explore and complicate three main strands of abstraction: formal abstraction, economic abstraction and withdrawal.”

Participating artists: Doug Ashford, Claire Barclay, Jos Len Cerrillo, Matias Faldbakken, Claudia Fernandez, Goldin+Senneby, Liam Gillick, Wade Guyton, Gunilla Klingberg, David Maljkovi, Mai-Thu Perret, Seth Price, Walid Raad, Emily Roysdon, Ultra-redÂ and Anton Vidokle.”

Museo Tamayo website_(link)

Interview with Maria Lind about Abstract Possible on Vimeo:_(link)

Paintings by children organized by Victor Castro with the educational department at the Tamayo Museum_(link)

Abstract Possible @ Museo Tamayo

Abstract Possible. Malmö Konsthalle, Malmo, SW. 10 November 2010 16, January 2011. Artists: Doug Ashford, Claire Barclay, Goldon+Senneby, Wade Guyton, Mai-Thu Perret.

From the press release:

Abstract Possible is a research project which aims at exploring notions of abstraction, taking contemporary art as its starting point. Clandestine, opaque, hermetic and abstract are all buzzwords frequently used in discussions of contemporary art over the last decade. A plethora of examples of formal abstraction, both geometric and expressive, is visible in exhibitions, site-specific installations, publications, and other projects. In addition to the many cases where geometric abstraction in art and design becomes a lifestyle indicator, artists contemplate and engage with the legacy of modernist abstraction as the result of highly specific artistic and ideological trajectories. But what does it mean to revisit these trajectories from the point of view of today? The concept of abstraction has also, within a Marxist framework – been applied to all relations within a capitalist system. As of late, this has been extended to the logic and distortion of scale engendered by the post-Fordist/late capitalist economy. Working conditions, and conditions of production, are other pertinent points of reference here. All this is happening within a culture and an economy in which we literally “live under abstraction,” although the economic recession has more recently called such abstraction into relief. Or as the art critic and theoretician Sven Lutticken recently put it “We are the natives of abstraction.”

Perhaps we can begin to think of these abstract/opaque strategies and tactics as a different critical paradigm challenging the enlightenment paradigm based on transparency? Or is it yet another phenomenon obscuring our view of the world? Each stage, or station, of Abstract Possible will be different with unique “sub-projects” which can be manifested as group shows, solo presentations, seminars, workshops, screenings, etc., depending on the nature of the location and the collaborations.

Curated by Maria Lind_(link)

Poster_(link)

Exhibition archive_ (link)