Ashton Bird (USA, b. 1990) is an installation artist and architectural designer residing in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He recently completed a 1-year contract as the John M. Anderson Visiting Assistant Professor through the Penn State School of Visual Arts located in State College, Pennsylvania. Relocating from Prague, Czechia he currently is a Master of Architecture candidate at the prestigious Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Bird was raised on a farm in southeast South Dakota, received his BFA from Minnesota State University-Mankato, apprenticed at Dakota Pottery in South Dakota, studied at Korea University in South Korea while briefly apprenticing at local Itaewon ceramic shop, and received his MFA from Florida State University. From 2015 to 2020, Ashton founded the 501c3 project space SOUP experimental where he curated 50+ on-site exhibitions, 24 video and written interviews, 3 public art crawls and several large-scale national collaborations between universities and private entities. Bird exhibits at traditional institutes, DIY projects, public art events and online venues. Notable locations include: Xiao Zhang Residence San Francisco, Klauzál6 Projekt Galéria, Loft Bubny Holešovice, Villa P651, MINT Atlanta, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta Fringe Festival, Day & Night Projects Atlanta, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Delaware Contemporary, Psychic Jacuzzi, The Washington Pavilion of South Dakota, 410 Gallery Mankato, Metropolitan Gallery 250 Philadelphia, Manifest Creative Research Gallery & Drawing Center Cincinnati, and Cat Family Records Tallahassee. He recently finished 3 residencies: a 3-month Nexus residency funded by the Nexus Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation at the Atlanta Contemporary, a private exhibition between Joshua Tree and San Francisco, California and a 1-month international invitation funded by the Municipality of Budapest, Hungary. From 2019 to 2022 Ashton was a full-time architectural lighting designer in The Johnson Studio at Cooper Carry. He has worked on several restaurant and hospitality ventures throughout the United States, but three notable projects include: Rumi’s Colony Square, Atlanta, Spaceman, Hyatt Buckhead and the Casa Don Alfonso, Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis.

ARTIST STATEMENT
 “Mythical Space of the first kind is a conceptual extension of the familiar and workaday spaces given by direct experience. When we wonder what lies on the other side of the mountain range or ocean, our imagination constructs mythical geographies that may bear little or no relationship to reality. Worlds of fantasy have been built on meager knowledge and much yearning…A less well-known phenomenon is the hazy, “mythical” space that surrounds the field of pragmatic activity, to which we do not consciously attend and which is yet necessary to our sense of orientation –of being securely in the world. Think of a man playing with his dog in the study. He sees what lies before him, and through noises and other sensory cues he is aware of the unseen parts of the environment. He is also dimly conscious of what he cannot perceive…the man’s world does not terminate at the walls of the study; beyond the study lie, successively, the house, streets, landmarks…When asked, he can envisage the broad field beyond the range of perception; he can make explicit some parts of a large store of tacit knowledge. He may point to a window and say, “Yes, Elm Street is out there and it runs north and south.” He may point to a wall and say, “I feel New York is out there, and therefore New Orleans is to my right.” …the unperceived field is every man’s irreducible mythical space, the fuzzy ambience…”
  – Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Taun, 2001

Through a meticulous blend of constructed fortifications, assemblages, and textured paintings or drawings, I embark on a visual odyssey through the intricate layers of human experience. These creations serve as poignant reflections on the rise and fall of civilizations, capturing intimate moments of mundane and monumental shifts in cultural landscapes. Each piece becomes a narrative tapestry, weaving together fragments of progress and decay, hope, bleakness and despair. The societal challenges that exist are demanding: climate change, increasing urbanization, negative potentials of artificial intelligence, hazardous infectious diseases, agricultural pollution, and land exhaustion–all negatively impact the human timeline and condition

“It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.”
  – The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, 1958

I read the Bachelard quote as the poetics between disillusion and optimism. It is the child-like idea of imagining utopia – which realistically may never happen, but in this context, it is these dreams that inspire us to pursue. The central motif of my artistic expression lies in the fragile dance of human ambition and vulnerability, mirrored in the psychology of constructed spaces. From makeshift shelters to towering monuments, I delve into the depths of material exploration –my installations and drawings become allegorical mirrors, reflecting the triumphs and tribulations of civilizations past and present. Utilizing a unique visual language of abstracted architectural forms, I breathe life into discarded remnants, transforming them into poignant symbols of cultural resilience and fragility –each creation becomes a vessel for introspection, inviting viewers to confront the timeless question of progress and its inevitable echoes through time.

“…given its ideal of progress, the fragmentary nature of modern existence continues to swing perpetually from the shock of the new to the dread of possible end and back again. Its ruins are not stable representations of the past but a constantly recycled aggregate of ideals, constructions, habitats, and tools that indict the present with its historical and potential future demise.”
– 2015, From the Ruins, The Brooklyn Rail, Tom McGlynn

I have been particularly invested in the use of drying raw clay as metaphor for politics, law and governance. The use of raw clay is a poetic take on the idea of politics and air as both govern the existence of our lives: clay works as the representation of the body where it begins wet but is pre-determined to dry and expire. Much like this physical element, politics is a pervasive force beyond political parties that influences every aspect from our lives –from the air we breathe, waste we generate, and the materials we discard–politics dictate the systems and structures that govern our existence. Given the nature of existence, how can we independently influence the predestined state? How much agency do we have in shaping our lives and the world around us?

Over time my installations and drawings have grown to comment on how the built environment has become inexplicably entangled with the politics of financial return as opposed to human wellness and positive architectural ideology. Artworks can potentially reference money’s influence on contemporary spatial design. I explore installations that contain chosen construction materials that represent the built environment in a visual, autonomous abstracted form. I have developed a personal language of abstracted architectural practices and materials that typically involve a mixture of triangular shapes, vertical floating pillars, false columns, faux floors and brittle collaged facades that create the structure of the space and are developed on-site from found, discarded material pertinent to location. In preparation, I combine the found, manipulated objects with purchased items such as clay, cement, paints, drop cloths and carpet cushion.

I am inspired by how the human condition driven by the ideal of progress is characterized within a constant fluctuation between excitement for new developments and the immortal fear of eventual decline. The ruins or what once was of this existence are not simply remnants of the past, but rather a mixture of past and present ideals, structures, living spaces, and technologies that serve as a reminder of both the historical failures and potential future decline. I find time’s state of flux and its movement between embracing the future and fear of its end quite motivating, tragic, and poetic. The notion of death and collapse for both the social and personal is ever present.