ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist who is deeply invested in playtime; wildly curious about bodies; mystified by femininity and masculinity; and confused about gender. I make images, objects, and spaces that instigate questions about our understanding of the body, gender, pleasure and play. I use humor and absurdity to disarm the (sometimes) confrontational nature of these themes. I pray on my own obsessively collected and balled beads of hair, warn off gender givers with my gender ≠ genitals identification t-shirt (what is it you see, when you read that sex=F marker?), and I feel perpetually aghast, nauseous, and exhausted at the unnecessary and destructive rhetoric, laws, and abhorrent actions of some.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ash Strazzinski (b. 1987, she/her) currently lives and works in Greensboro, NC. She received a BFA with an emphasis in photography as well as a minor in art history from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2013 and her MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2022. Awards, grants, and residencies include: 2022 Hit-and-Run Artist-in-Residence, Lump Gallery (Raleigh, NC); 2021 Artist-in-Residence, Greensboro Project Space (Greensboro, NC); 2020 participant in Overland Artworks, Shelter Residency (Easthampton, MA); 2020 Artist-in-Residence, Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); 2019 New England Creative Community Fellow, National Art Strategies (Topsham, VT); 2019, two-time recipient of Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire grants for Ashland Street Project Space and the City Council Zine series (North Adams, MA); 2019 Assets for Artists project grant recipient (North Adams, MA); 2018 Hinge Artist-in-Residence, Springboard for the Arts (Fergus Falls, MN); 2018 North Adams Project Matched Savings grant program, Assets for Artists (North Adams, MA); 2018 participant in Overland Artworks, ALT- Residency (North Adams, MA).
© Ash Strazzinski