Cold War paintings, 2018

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.