Ali Aschman

Ali Aschman is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago, originally from South Africa. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and a BA from the University of Cape Town in 2006. She has exhibited internationally, and after her residency at Spudnik Press she will be attending residencies at the Rensing Center, the Art Students’ League and Elsewhere. 

 

Website:

aliaschman.com/

Residency Period:

Mar 2014–May 2014

Project Statement:

Ali will be working on a portfolio of woodcuts and screenprints that will be used to create a short stop-motion animation, integrating the process of printmaking with a filmed narrative. Layered surfaces will create rich textured environments across which articulated printed objects will move. She will be exploring imagery of the body’s traversal of the urban built environment, as a metaphor for inner emotional states.

Artist Statement

I make hand-made worlds exploring emotional states and moral grey areas. Innocence and violence, hybridity, transformation, alienation and guilt are recurring themes. Mysterious, melancholy narratives raise questions about human interactions. I am particularly interested in the brutality we inflict on one another, physically and emotionally, and the impulses we suppress. My practice includes sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and animation, often combined in installations. I engage in slow, meticulous processes and contrast them with more tactile and often clumsier sculptural methods. I experiment with narrative forms, and am interested in how an allegory can be conveyed through moving and still images, kinetic and static objects and sculptural tableaux.

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