ABOUT

Ava Lee grew up in Larchmont, NY and has loved art from a young age. Growing up, she was surrounded by art, as both her parents are artists. She graduated from Bard College in December 2022, where she majored in studio arts. Her primary mode of working is a very mixed media approach, often combining her skills in drawing, painting, printmaking, and collage. She also has lifelong experience working with ceramics. She recently had a solo exhibition at Universal Building Supply in Red Hook NY.

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ARTIST STATEMENT

My work  is based on two separate and distinct approaches of addressing the same themes—one of post apocalyptic world building, coming from a rich interior narrative  that has ties to both the environment we live in, as well as an imaginative portrait of what could be—and one of looking at this place we inhabit, trying to understand and grapple with the many contradictions it contains. Ultimately, these two approaches are about the same things, although one takes place in a fabricated yet potentially not so distant post apocalyptic future, and one is a portrait of the here and now.  Growing up in a time of deep uncertainty, a time where the climate is in crisis, a time where industry rules, and nothing about the future can be promised, my art attempts to encapsulate this feeling of instability. Contradiction is a key element in my work– the constant pressure of life diminishing rapidly, as well as the overwhelming presence of beauty and ways in which life prospers all around us. It’s about the coexistence of the constructed industrial world and the natural world, and the intersection of hope and sorrow within those two separate, and yet completely intertwined aspects of our existence on Earth. Trees stretch up into the sky, and telephone poles and transmission towers do too. In my time on this planet, the structures and landscapes I am drawn to lead me down a train of thought that often takes me to the same place in my creative process–how strange, that our world is teeming with both human creation and destruction, that these things are perhaps inseparable, almost indistinguishable from each other.