Ashley Lyon in the Euclid Avenue Gallery at The Sculpture Center, surrounded by Weighing the Sunset. Photo by Jacob Koestler.
Slideshow of Ashley Lyon’s Weighing the Sunset. All photos by Jacob Koestler.
a Window to Sculpture Emerging Artist Series 2016 exhibition
Ashley Lyon: Weighing the Sunset
Euclid Avenue Gallery
Ashley Lyon: Weighing the Sunset
Euclid Avenue Gallery
March 18 – May 20, 2016
Friday, March 18
Opening of Ashley Lyon: Weighing the Sunset and Jim Leach: Being Healthy @ 5:30 – 8:00 PM
The Artist Talks: Ashley Lyon in the Euclid Avenue Gallery @ 6:15 PM
The Artist Talks: Jim Leach with Robert Thurmer in the Main Gallery @ 7:00 PM
Click on the picture to view our W2S 2016 Catalog!
Ashley Lyon’s ceramic work to date mainly takes form in hand built sculptures of the human figure and its parts. She is not interested in a reiteration of hand, foot, or head seen in traditional figuration but would rather locate in her work the core and sensation of being human. Her intent is to bring to the fore a viewer’s empathetic response, haptic perceptions, and psychological projections. For this W2S 2016 exhibition she has created a new body of work of heavily pigmented clay bodies. To avoid obscuring the unique textures of the clay body and those generated by hand building, Lyon pigments the clay itself rather than utilizing any surface glazes as in traditional ceramics. She intends the specific pigmentation choices as conceptual and visual devices to suggest the penetration of idea and color throughout the material whole of the piece, to express her emotional response when considering the essence of the object she is making.
The artist writes, “I want to make several figurative fragments and figurative objects, which give nod to traditional Greek and Roman statuary worn and dismembered by time. The replicated and appropriated historical imagery will be conflated with forms that are clearly derived from our contemporary time, presenting a mediation on mortality and the failures of the body. Simultaneously, they represent our unstable nature of flesh and blood in an era of virtuality.”
Ashley Lyon received her BFA (2006) from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her MFA in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2011). She is currently teaching as Assistant Professor at New Jersey City University, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Ashley is co-founder and co-director of The Belfry, an artist- run exhibition space in Hornell, NY. Her work has shown in galleries in New York, Washington, Virginia, and the Netherlands. In 2012 Lyon was a recipient of the Turner Teaching Fellowship at Alfred University where she taught for three years. She has participated in artist residencies in Nebraska and the Netherlands and has given workshops and lectures for artist institutes like Oxbow and SUNY Cortland.
This exhibition is generously supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the John P. Murphy Foundation. The catalog is made possible by the generous support of the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
