Ashley V. Blalock

Selected Exhibitions and Events

Upcoming:

- May 2008: Artwork to be published in the Sand Canyon Review

- May 2008: I will be participating in Arthouse at the Jones Center's annual 5x7 Art Splurge and Exhibition in         
                   Austin, Texas

- June 8, 2008 - January 9, 2009: Artwork will be included in the exhibition Forms in Wood and Fiber on view
                                                       at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park in San Diego

- July 2008: Exhibition at Gallery La Mesa in San Diego, CA. Opening reception July 11th. More details to come!

Interweave Crochet

My artwork was profiled in Interweave Crochet Magazine's Spring 2007 issue!

New American Talent
Arthouse at the Jones Center, Texas

June 17 through August 22, 2006
Will continue on tour through 2008

Other Venues:
-Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi, 2006

New American Talent is consistently one of the most open, surprising, and therefore well-respected, juried shows in the
country. (Aimee Chang, May 2006).

Austin, TX, (May 15, 2006)—Arthouse is pleased to announce New American Talent: The Twenty-First Exhibition at the
Jones Center (700 Congress Avenue) Saturday, June 17 through Sunday, August 20, 2005.  

The twenty-first in a series of annual juried exhibitions, New American Talent features the work of emerging national artists
working in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, photography and new media.  Each work on view was selected
by New American Talent  juror Aimee Chang, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport
Beach, California, and former Exhibition Coordinator and Assistant Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. This year’s
New American talent showcases the work of 59 artists from the United States—22 of whom currently live and work in Texas:

With regard to her selection process, Chang states, “This year saw a fifty percent increase in the number of submissions
for the exhibition….”  According to Chang:

Reviewing the thousands of submissions confirmed my sense of the openness prevalent in work being made by artists in
the U.S. and abroad. The works in the New American Talent exhibition range in media from the traditional—painting,
photography and drawing - to the extraordinary—serape and crochet thread, a re-vamped microwave, gasoline
containers, cast sugar, tape, and broken umbrellas.  Video art plays a prominent role and one work utilizes the Internet
and highlights the pervasiveness of satellite images of all corners of the world. The division between art and craft,
widespread in past decades, is ridiculously anachronistic in today’s wide-open art world.  (Aimee Chang, May 2006).

PUBLICATION
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by Aimee Change, selected juror for New
American Talent: The Twenty-First Exhibition.

New Beginnings

Art on display through March 17, 2006
Roger Lewis King Gallery, San Diego, CA

Featuring: Ashley Blalock, Nicole Byrne, Janelle Carter, Ame Curtiss, Jocille Flores, Daphne Hill, Amy Hyde,
Kelly Orange, Ginger Placek, Mullet Pony, Lisa Roberts, Bridget Rountree, Tiffany Blake Stone, Macoe Swett,
Athena Toner, Erika Thorpe, Maura Vazakas, Lisa Ann Wilson, Jasmine Worth.

Curated by: Ashley Blalock, Tiffany Blake Stone

Review Excerpts

Excerpt from "New American Talent: A Review of Arthouse's New American Talent 21"
by James Bae of Fluent~Collaborative

"However, aesthetic strangeness of a quieter vain can be found in the works of Lori Nelson, Adrian Esparza, and Ashley
Blalock, in various ways.... Crafted out of a small crochet, the double self-portrait effect of Blalock’s Shadow Self (2005),
with light streaming through the negative open spaces of the knitting [sic], incorporates matters of self, replication, and
insinuation of woman’s craft in one of the show’s most calmly erudite and disquieting works."

Highlights from "All hands on deck" (review of "New Beginnings")
by Robert Pincus of the San Diego Union-Tribune

“There's undeniable charm to the number of r's that the art collective “Grrrrrl Power” has added to a word that usually gets
only one. If you sound out the name of this loose collective of artists, you get a phonetically assertive version of “girl,” which
is, of course, to the point. “

“These artists feel empowered by banding together as a way to get their work before an audience with greater frequency….
The concept has worked”

“One detects implied self-portraiture in Martinez's collages and Vazakas' paintings. This is the thrust of Blalock's “Box
Self,” for which she has constructed an image of her face, in a pensive mode, with yarn and a plastic screen set within a
free-standing box.”