Archive Project 9: Ashley Thorner

Doug Harvey's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Ashley Thorner Home Page Archive - Spring 2001 Home

The Project Series
Project 9: Ashley Thorner

For the last five years, Los Angeles-based artist Ashley Thorner has worked with plastics-vinyl, latex, liquid plastic, etc. In this exhibition she brought together for the first time the large-scale Beware of the Blob and four "chandelier" sculptures, Pink Love Lotus, Blue Love Lotus, Synthetic Green, and Neon Pink. With this work, Thorner furthers her explorations into plastics- glistening surfaces, appealingly artificial colors, and globular shapes.

Thorner uses nontraditional media in a body of work that explores popular culture and consumerism; reflects an interest in pop art, kitsch, and minimalism; and addresses the dualities of control and disorder, artifice and reality. Eva Hesse's process-oriented, "anti-form" sculptures, and Claus Oldenburg's playful alterations of the scale of manufactured objects, have influenced Thorner's development as an artist.

Thorner's work is influenced equally by such pop-culture sources as science-fiction cartoons and 1950s monster movies like The Blob, and by more philosophical approaches to life seen in the contemporary Japanese art of "Chindogu" and William Burroughs' "The Discipline of DE (Do Easy)." "Chindogu" are inventions to make life easier, but that have a tendency to fail-completely, but heroically and beautifully. Burroughs' concept of "Do Easy" comes from a chapter in his novel Exterminator! that explores a way of "doing" things in the world in the most relaxed yet most efficient manner possible. Thorner connects these ideas formally and conceptually by creating minimalist forms with excessive materials (vinyl, glitter, candy, latex, cow gut, and liquid plastic used to make fishing worms); by means of an intensely laborious technique (for example, using the head of a pin to place thousands of tiny dots on her chandeliers); and through shifts in scale from the miniature to the gigantic. At once gentle and subversive, humorous and obsessive, attractive and repulsive, her sculptures explore femininity, the body, sensuality, and popular culture.

Ashley Thorner's exhibition was the ninth in Montgomery Gallery's Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts. During each exhibition, participating artists work with faculty and students in relevant disciplines.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator