I explore issues of race, class, and social standing through approaches to self-representation and the constructed image. Inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth-century portraiture and its precarious modes of depiction, my work deconstructs ideas of secure identity and fixed painting techniques through subtexts of the staged, self-aware portrait. A related body of work involves still life vanitas paintings created from discarded reference photographs and reproductions of self-portraits that were crumpled and tossed aside.

My paintings range from compressed lines of color to geometric and abstract eruptions. I synthesize color, sound, and texture to create “digitized” or “dissolved” landscapes, using a specific palette sampled from a variety of natural sources in the landscape/environment, particularly flora: reflections in water, storm clouds, leaves, sugar cane, dead foliage, flowers, lichens, soil. I blend the colors on-site and then take the samples into the studio, where I mix larger quantities of matched colors. This is my primary palette. Working in a variety of mediums

Ashley A. Doggett is a Black Nashville-based artist whose work explores and confronts issues surrounding race, religion, and gender by highlighting aspects of the Black experience within the Americas. Doggett gives credence to the experiences of their people and ancestors while being conscious of the histories that have defined the world as Black people have known it, both past and present. Using art as a platform for social activism, Doggett’s images and writings educate, inspire, and develop conversations around minority struggles and empowerment.

These are images with indefinite boundaries. They refer to themselves yet point beyond their own borders. They are precarious, contingent on specific conditions for their very existence. A painting reiterates its own overlapping shadows; wrinkled paper presents a printed image of the same wrinkles, each feature visible twice. They request attention to that which we usually ignore.

These works are conundrums. They are riddles one can answer only by shifting one’s awareness.

I work on the relationship between art architecture and society and have been influenced by the experience of living and working in Peru, Japan, England and the United States.

My work is an examination of pejorative societal devices that pronounce positions of racial inferiority and feelings of alienation, providing a context for the dissonance between my Tejano heritage and childhood aspiration to feel “normal” in a white space. I recontextualize family stories in relation to cultural signifiers, social mobility, and ethnic representation to decipher my understanding of our present political climate.

I recombine and recontextualize consumer products, fabricated garments, and kitsch-based craft materials through stacking, dressing, styling, and painting. I draw influences from pop culture, splicing together anything from green/sustainable aesthetics to art-historical references, with a contradictory attitude of irony and sincerity. I make modular arrangements that can be presented in many different ways, either on the body, through performance, in a photograph, or in physical space. I deal with concepts of gender, subversion, and transformation. Combinations are personified as

In my paintings, for over a decade I have utilized Civil War–era photographs to help illustrate my exploration of contemporary issues, both personal and universal. My father’s death when I was sixteen forced me to seriously consider my mortality, which led to a long investigation into my spiritual core and what it means to be human. The work has never been specifically about the Civil War, but I have found the war’s imagery ideal for symbolic storytelling dealing with themes of courage, woundedness, home, ego, and faith.

In this series of paintings, I use the icon of the blackboard to reexamine some of what we know about a group of our most familiar historical figures, myths, and cultural phenomena. Our understanding of this should not stop at what we were told in elementary school.

The content of my recent body of work is fueled by found drawings left by museum visitors. While working as a gallery attendant, I was accustomed to finding strange, unfinished sketches left in the galleries. Abandoned and out of context, these drawings possess a sense of humor but also deep sincerity, as their makers created them while observing works of art in the museum. By reproducing these images through trompe l’oeil–style paintings, I activate a value shift. For example, children’s scribbles no longer exist as an afterthought, they’ve