Review

A profile of Kansas City artist Ashley Lande

Ashley Lande, detail of "Electric Snakeskin Glittereze." Image: courtesy of the artist

Trying to describe what is happening in an Ashley Lande piece is like attempting to retell a dream. There are vivid scenes — ones that are easy to remember — but it is difficult to know where to begin. Instead, one surrenders to banal generalizations, claiming it to be about loss or having a lot of sunshine. Using the same broad terms, the work of Ashley Lande is psychedelic, but it is also imaginative, uninhibited, and undeniably trendy.

She quit drinking coffee three weeks before, and Lande now sits beverage-less at a table in the Roasterie café. Her long, chestnut-colored hair partially covers a small tattoo of roses that wraps around her arm. Bob Dylan’s “How Does it Feel” plays quietly. “I love this song,” she says, naming Dylan and Ravi Shankar as major influences.

As she prepares for an upcoming group show at Windhorse Gallery, though, the 27-year-old artist has immersed herself in the music and biography of Neil Young.

Ashley Lande, "When I Stood Upon a Mountain and My Father's Hand Was Trembling With the Beauty of the Word." Image: courtesy of the artist

Wearing suede moccasins, an aqua ballerina dress, and lipstick the color of grapefruit sorbet, Lande seems to have been born from a pattern in her work. Her realistic graphite portraits are infused with intricate, watercolor details of cyan, magenta, yellow, and orange, resulting in spiritual and mystical scenes not unlike David Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot Deck or any number of Jimi Hendrix album covers. Naked clones of bearded men in loincloths shoot rainbow-colored laser beams into each other as they dance around skulls. Although she is product of university schooling, Lande rejects educational institutions. She is also married, and nine months ago, she became a mother. Her quiet, reserved nature is a stark but intriguing contrast to her unrepressed, emotive works on paper. Lande is a modern-day flower child, and it makes one just a little curious to know more about her.

A relative newcomer to the art world, Lande’s work seamlessly blends the psychedelic and spiritual experimentation imagery of the Summer of Love with symbols and experiences from her life. However, she hasn't always made art. As a child she drew constantly, but after high school, it wasn’t something she thought about pursuing. Instead, Lande went to the University of Missouri and studied journalism.

"Going through institutional schooling, it's easy to have parts of yourself suppressed,” she says. “I didn't want to be a journalism major, but I was so pushed into doing writing, that I did it."

Lande managed her way through the undergraduate program and afterward landed a job with The Kansas City Star and freelanced for the Pitch. She was even working on a novel, but Lande says she couldn't shake the feeling of being stuck.

And then, just before her 24th birthday, she drew.

And drew.

And drew.

"I started drawing, and a flow of creativity that had been dammed by myself — creativity I had suppressed, ignored and neglected — just came out of me," she says.

Lande couldn't stop. And she used anything she could find — brown butcher paper from the restaurant where she worked and Bic pens because she couldn't afford much else. In retrospect, Lande views these first works on butcher paper as the start of a spiritual awakening that had been a long time coming. What began as her own therapy — a way of documenting her present state — transformed into a 2008 solo exhibition at Kansas City’s Mercy Seat Gallery. Even then, Lande’s work was infused with the symbols and popping color of her current psychotropic drawings and paintings. Multiple versions of her inky self — crying, running, yelling — tear across the sheets of paper that could almost be storyboards from an Alejandro Jodorowsky film. Although Lande names Holy Mountain as a major influence, these works are hers — created from her own symbology and experience.

Ashley Lande, "Ascension." Image: courtesy of the artist

“It was strange because it was appreciated," Lande says of Glutting the Sensorium, pausing to collect her memories of the opening night. “People could tell it came from a real place. The work was such a monumental catharsis that I was able to put on paper, and the show was a climax of energies I had been building."

Lande describes the journey from that first show until now as an emotional roller coaster. “I put so much of myself and what I had been going through into those first drawings,” Lande says, “so after that, everything was kind-of a letdown.”

It wasn’t until a few months later, when she met Steven, now her husband, that Lande noticed an artistic change: When she was happy, she made better art — quite the opposite of the heartbreak and depression from which artists supposedly draw inspiration.

“Since I’ve fallen in love, met my soul mate, gotten married, and had a baby," she says, "I'm much less absorbed in my own turmoil. Now that I'm not generating my own drama, I feel good about the art I'm making.”

Ashley Lande, "Indio." Image: courtesy of the artist

Still, do not think that Lande’s artistic process is anything like a fairytale. She longs for a studio, but instead she works from the coffee table in the living room of her house in Waldo, spreading out graphite, watercolors, and paintbrushes to work for a few hours each weekend, when Steven takes their nine-month-old, Israel, out for the afternoon. If she has a spare moment, Lande tries to draw, but with a young baby and three dogs, her days fill up quickly.

Lande has been working on a piece for the September exhibition at Windhorse Gallery for the past four months, doing a little bit every weekend. Inspired by a trip to Watkins Mill with her friend, McKinley, Lande’s piece, Consult Your Pineal Gland is a graphite portrait surrounded by watercolor grids. Smiling as she describes McKinley (“He's very psychedelic and a very dear friend. He has a way of phrasing things.”), it is obvious that being happy and making art works well for her. Though the psychedelic genre remains a strong influence on her work, Lande claims her son to be her newest, most important muse.

“I used to think you had to be sad to make good art,” says Lande, peeking out from behind her long, brown fringe. “But now I'm not as attracted as I was to the dark extreme. It's not that it isn't there, but I'm just not into it.”

The apex is a significant symbol in nearly all of Lande’s work, often serving as the stage for where her concepts take shape. Her scenes are imbued with otherworldly mysticism. The wrinkled faces of ancient shaman healers appear like clouds. Darker images of skulls look toward human figures, suggesting that Lande’s happiness is not without its counterpart. Although these icons have recently found their way onto furniture, T-shirts, and a slew of art/culture blogs, they are sacred, personal images from Lande’s visions — not trends she follows. Elements of Lande’s life also take the form of repeated symbols in her drawings. Graphite faces of her husband, woven together by beards, fill up her works on paper. Any number of the family’s dogs make regular appearances. Israel has now been the subject of two pieces. In a realistic, graphite birth portrait, he is surrounded by fluorescent and neon tribal patterns. At the top of the work, a pair of hands open up to him. In another drawing, Lande sits nude and cross-legged, breast-feeding the baby. A circular grid of watercolor forms an over-sized halo around their heads.

For a woman who only began drawing in earnest a few years ago, Lande demonstrates both conceptual and technical strength and is doing quite well for herself. With solo and group exhibitions in Kansas City, San Francisco, New York, and London, she has had a busy two years. The Internet loves her, too. Bloggers are excited when she adds new work to her website, and she recently collaborated with Pac Sun on a T-shirt design. After Mantik Manifesto at Windhorse Gallery, Lande will head to Los Angeles, where she will be part of another group exhibition, Close a World Below at the Scion space.

Ashley Lande, "Wrangled Brain Tangle." Image: courtesy of the artist

“In the beginning, seeing the work wasn't important,” says Lande. “In the beginning, exhibiting wasn't a concern. Now, I have to say, it’s nice.”

As she speaks, there is a poeticism to Lande’s phrasing. When she talks about the attention she has received, she chooses words carefully. Perhaps it is because making art has come relatively recently in her life, but as she talks about her artistic process, it is obvious that she doesn’t take her choice to make art nor her on-going success for granted.

“I take care of my art and materials,” she says of her limited supplies. “I use things sparingly. I really care about hanging onto them.”

Although she (along with gallerists and her online following) feels confident in her artistic self, Lande and her art remain in a spiritual flux.

“It's a constant metamorphosis,” she says. “It's never a destination.

“Art chose me. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't go to school for it. There was just no other way to convey the experiences I had had. I love words; I love books; but they're not universal. Images, though, are the language of the soul.”

From the Review calendar:

Windhorse Tattoo and Gallery of the Arts
1717 Wyandotte Street, Suite 200
Kansas City, Missouri
816-283-0500
Gallery hours: Saturday, Sunday, noon-5 p.m., and Monday, Thursday and Friday by appointment

Mantik Manifesto
Mark Galloway, Carter Gilliss, Adrian Halpern, Ashley Lande, Shane Ogren, Luke Rocha, and Kyle Strahm
Second Friday opening reception: September 10, 6-10 p.m.
September 10 — 26

-re-

Popularity: 7% [?]

Updating...