2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Ashleigh Abbott is an interdisciplinary artist with a research based practice. Her investigations seek to understand how social ills such as school shootings, incel culture and gender-based violence are related to policy and scientism that is embedded with supremacist, religious and patriarchal biases. The writings of Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, Maggie Nelson and clowning practice of Adriana Medina help to inform her rebellious twists that employ intimacy and engage discovery and joy found throughout her art practice.      

Her work in conversation with AI glimpses into the collective mind of western cultural biases which she focuses on futurity and desire. In this exploration, she created a set of botanical/human hybrid action figures that playfully reimagine how masculinity can exist without pain and violence and harmoniously alongside other gender expressions in a posthuman world. In her monumental sculpture, Paradise, iridescent synthetic hair and salt are combined in a quasi-abstract pose of the black sickle bill’s mating dance. She values this bird as an emblem of natures capacity to prioritize beauty above struggle, shattering the view that strong-arm hierarchies are the way of the world.

Ashleigh Abbott is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work around the topics of masculinity, social forms, motherhood, nature, play and desire. Her practice is research based, investigating critical discourses around gender and the intertwined histories of misogyny and supremacies in policy, science and religion. Her work often emerges in speculative, abstract, and humorous ways that range from performance to sculpture, painting, or sound.  

She has been awarded Covington Rhodes Prize and The Bio Design Challenge Award as well as multiple other awards from national and international organizations. She was the 2022 Curator Fellow at Parsons, The New School. Her work has been shown in New York in exhibitions at Gallery MC, the Aronson Gallery, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons 25 East 13th Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, along with other exhibitions through the United States, Spain and Morocco.