| First introduced to the paintings of Hackworth Ashley by Lee Wells’ curated “future perfect” wall at –scope Hamptons last summer, I was an immediate fan. Anyone who knows my style, knows this is it. “Is that Bill Cosby with his dick out?” And the rainbows! It looked to me like Bill himself couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation. I immediately put my Editorial Assistant, Suzie Walshe, on the case. “Find this freak!” Seems Ashley was represented by Weiss Pollack in New York, a gallery which just closed shop. The Chelsea gallery also repped another of my favorite painters, Zachary Clement. ‘Tis a shame. |  |
Silver Spin on a Chemical Nightmare – Steven Psyllos
First introduced to the paintings of Hackworth Ashley by Lee Wells’ curated “future perfect” wall at –scope Hamptons last summer, I was an immediate fan. Anyone who knows my style, knows this is it. “Is that Bill Cosby with his dick out?” And the rainbows! It looked to me like Bill himself couldn’t help but laugh at the whole situation.
I immediately put my Editorial Assistant, Suzie Walshe, on the case. “Find this freak!” Seems Ashley was represented by Weiss Pollack in New York, a gallery which just closed shop. The Chelsea gallery also repped another of my favorite painters, Zachary Clement. ‘Tis a shame. So directly to Lee Wells we go. Lee Wells, if you don’t recall, was interviewed by our very own Leah Oates in the September/October issue on his “Perpetual Art Machine” video project, which Hackworth is also involved in. Contact.
Meeting Hackworth confirmed a few things: the artist had a sense of humor, was completely laid back and cool, and was a young talent on the rise. I drove over to his studio in Flatbush and was given a brief tour of his works. Standing front and center was a work-in-progress: Paris Hilton floating in deep space, grabbing her huge cock.
Hackworth Ashley is insane, no doubt, but he’s also clever. His work is not some fashionable shit that is put on canvas to sell. You might think, celebrities should not be represented in artwork. It’s trite, it’s easy. Remember the sculpture of Britney giving birth on the bearskin rug? Made Page Six effortlessly but is there any value to it? So I asked him where this “Celebrity Fantasy” series came from.
“In the beginning I started making images and I really hadn’t thought about why. It started coming out, and I started breaking it down in my own mind,” he explains. “All these people are in your subconscious, and you don’t really know why. They’re just in these television shows, they’re celebrities, yeah. But celebrities are like symbols of the decay of the individual in society. Who we respect reflects on us. These people I know, but there’s no reason why I know them. There’s almost no worth except for some strange moral that came out of one of their sitcoms or something.“
And why the dicks, my friend? “They’re not sexual in the slightest, they’re phallic symbols. The phallic symbol has been around since the dawn of image-making, representing power.”
The two of us rambled on about contemporary society and our generation being saturated with excessive bullshit while growing up in front of the television. It was wonderful to hear how articulate the artist was about the ideas that fuel his work. Slowly, the works became less funny. Except for the Colin Farrell piece: “For some reason, and I don’t know why, I hate him. It’s a feeling I get about him, so I guess it’s some kind of revenge.”
We then set up before his computer and started running through some new videos he made.
“You’re gravitating towards video nowadays. That’s a nice healthy wash from creating a painting over long periods of time, a more immediate satisfaction,” I commented.
“I think just growing up in this generation, you can’t get around wanting to work on something that’s going to be on the television screen. That little box of light,” he continues, “it makes you feel some strange power to put an image on it.”
The audio element—all his own—had a very scary undertone that seemed to pull all the (bright) colors from the work, swallowing the soul and regurgitating some LSD flashback that left my teeth numb. I was amazed and confused at the darkness of the material. He explained that these videos stem from a period in his life while he was on anti-depressants. “I’d have these nightmares, man, that were like a sped-up repetition of images, similar to this, flat images. And then I’d go into these strange visions of sped-up consciousness for hours on end where I would absorb so much information that I couldn’t even figure it out. It would be all images in my head, like the Beatles with bright red eyes.”
And I looked around the studio and I saw it all with a fresh lens. Ashley has this nightmare aesthetic; “a silver spin on a chemical nightmare” is what popped into my head. “Silver” because I suddenly had a metallic taste in my mouth. These faces lodged in our collective unconscious, Cosby gesturing like a rapper with his dick sprouting happy rainbows, standing in some blurry nowhere world.
Grotesque, this culture, these florid ornaments and icons of our society. The soundtrack from the video slowing things down for me as it all fit into place. Dark, jagged collage work. Sketchbooks filled with penmarks, sometimes violent. To slow it down, expose it all. A still frame of a spinning narrative we call the day-to-day, bright lights, fractured images pooled together like a broken mirror, each shard reflecting a distinct color and image. The blend, brilliant.
His method allows you special night googles to explore the darkness.
We continued our conversation over the taunting shrills of his latest video piece as the tape recorder stood witness. That tape is being sold on Ebay, starting price: two grand.
We put together an exhibit of his works at the Broadway Gallery in November, featuring several paintings, a video installation, four large-scale blowups of small collages, one photo and an intricate black wax sculpture.
Artist statement for the show: “I think ADHD is the first inkling of the human mind adjusting to the current over-saturation of stimuli in the modern world. The brain is mutating to become equipped to cope and I think the condition should be cultivated, not medicated.”
