Wk 8 – Artist Conversation #3 – Ashley Anderson

For my third “Artist Conversation”, I headed over to the California State University Long Beach SOA art galleries where I visited Ashley Anderson’s art exhibit. Ashley is currently an undergraduate and is majoring under illustration for BFA Pre-production program. Illustrations allow Ashley to explore her ideas and include her own identity within her work.

Ashleys exhibit features plenty of items that add to the theme of her exhibit. Her work features plenty of soft pastel colors that give the room a naturistic vibe. Her art pieces all play a specific color scheme that features plenty of different colors like soft blues, purple, green, brown to depict a late night sky and plenty more. The room also has a big backdrop that is painted with plenty of soft colors. The backdrop is placed right in the middle of the back wall of the exhibit and ties the color schemes together since it features a mix of soft yellow, orange, blue, green, red that are perfectly blended into each other. The backdrop is also covered by green leaves on a wooden stand. 

Anderson explains how she explores plenty of folktales that she grew up with. She states she’s from the South and how as a kid, she accepted all of these folktales and thought they were real at some point. As Anderson grew up, she realized how some of the folktale she believed in as a kid were lies and sometimes even problematic. Now, she uses those tales to break them down and investigate ways of applying positive lessons into her own identity. Anderson is highly interested in “horror” and explains why her pieces are a bit more “spooky” and explains why she includes figures like the goat lady and different creatures.

I highly enjoyed this exhibit because I was instantly drawn by how aesthetically pleasing this whole exhibit was. The color scheme used all throughout the pieces is extremely soothing even though every piece is different than each other. I also enjoyed how nice their painted backdrop included leaves all around it with a stand full of bottles to add to the “Folktale” vibe. The artist did a great job of exploring her ideas and enabling the viewer to get a message out of every piece.

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