Gallery Response 1

Ashley Lyon, Wellspring, 2017

Ashley Lyon, Mother, and Child, 2022

"Innocent"

"2019"

"Now"

There were many works in the gallery that captured my attention, but the two that I was very fond of were Ashley Lyon’s clay sculpture Wellspring and the sculpture Mother and Child. Ashley Lyson’s clay work captured my attention because it looked so realistic, it looked like a piece of quilt sitting on a platform. When the artist started talking about the meaning of the quilt it was very meaningful to her because it was a family heirloom her grandmother had created. Her piece of clay work is like a photo for her that is going to last her a long time. In one of our readings in class from Susan Sontag’s excerpt on photography, she states “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Ashley Lyon’s quilt is a piece of her reality, she turned a piece of fabric her grandmother made into an artwork she can hold onto for a very long time and share with others. She explained that it conveyed a feeling of protection and warmth she created a piece of her reality. Her clay piece is her form of a photograph that relates to her life and what relates to her. The other sculpture she created Mother and Child could hold different meanings from different perspectives because the still life was an anchor rope that was like the one, she owned, not only was the item she created sentimentally but the meaning of her sculpture was about her motherhood. In Susan Sontag’s excerpt on photography, she also mentions “In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.” She explained she was just playing around with the clay not sure what she was going to make. She explained how ceramics can easily break and create something new or add another meaning. Ashley Lyon said, “Mother and Child intertwine in a visual complexity mirroring physiologic and psychological states inherent in any relationship between mother and her child.” Her work explains different complicated emotions that go on in her life. I an outsider looking at the clay piece assumed that it could represent chaos happening in one's life. What she created was a part of her life at the time of how she was feeling starting motherhood. Susan Sontag’s excerpt On Photography correlates with this idea “to collect photos is to collect the world.” In Ashley Lyon's case, she created something that collects the scenarios or events she is now something that collects her feelings. 

            The selfies inspired by the still life artworks are pictures of my stages of growing up, I hold these pictures dear to me because it was pictured when I was a child and did not know any better than a picture of me graduating high school and going through a tough time in my life trying to figure out who I am as a person what’s going to happen after, to a picture of me currently. When I look at these pictures, they are pictures that bring me back to who I was at that time to whom I became now. When I look at my graduation pictures from high school, I remember the old me less confident less social, and did not know any better, looking at those pictures takes me back to when I started my first job, when I first started thinking about my future career, what my major is. Now when I look at a current picture of myself, I think about how much I have changed as a person and how I wouldn’t even recognize the old me. In a sense she’s dead. Just like Ashley Lyson’s clay work speaks to her current emotional status and mental these pictures speak to me when I think about my mental health when I think about me. In Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark "Kitchen Table Series" she says “photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience.” These photos I have of myself are old reflections of who I was as an individual and whom I became.