Introduction
ASHLEY WILLIAMS
From: Roanoke, VA
Medium: painting, drawing and mixed media
Statement:
Like the city streets, the modern world floods our bodies with information. Scientific advancements and improvements in communication technology mean that it has become increasingly difficult to extract the useful from the extraneous. In response to this, our bodies function as a system that both absorbs and discards sounds, statistics and images. However, this internal system is inefficient. We cannot contain everything and the process of filtering out information can cause us to overlook what is most important. Stillness is sometimes necessary. My art, in some ways, is about reclaiming what has been filtered out by embracing the confusion, diagramming and displaying it. It is a process, I think, similar to long-exposure photography. Like the earliest Daguerreotypes, the lens is left open long enough for images to crowd the picture plane, overlapping each other until, like the famous shoe shiner in “Boulevard du Temple”, something important begins to surface. It is only through observing and accepting the whole, that we eventually find our focus.
