hi i’m ashley carey
(if you couldn’t tell already)
My practice is grounded in lived experience and operates as an ongoing inquiry into the construction of female subjectivity. Working primarily in oil painting, I examine the objectification of women and the layered formation of personal identity within systems that render the female body hyper-visible and perpetually performing.
To move through the world as a woman is to develop an acute self-consciousness, an awareness shaped by surveillance, performance, and social expectation. This heightened perception informs both the conceptual and formal dimensions of my work. Painting becomes a site of resistance and reconfiguration: a space in which women and girls can exist outside prescriptive frameworks and renegotiate their relationship to visibility.
Rather than accepting objectification as a passive condition, I appropriate its visual language. By “objectifying” myself on my own terms, I complicate the gaze and reclaim agency within it. I invert traditional hierarchies by anthropomorphizing objects, transforming them into female-coded presences with psychological depth, thereby disrupting the historical tendency to render women as inert, consumable forms.
Formally, I juxtapose a playful, often saturated palette with traditional glazing techniques, invoking the historical canon of oil painting while inserting a contemporary female-centered perspective. I use feline fur and patterns, both feminine and predatory, to function as metaphors for latent violence in being embedded in gendered experience. In constructing a personal female iconography, I confront the persistent performativity of existence and seek moments of intrinsic selfhood that resist categorization.
paint like a girl -
paint like a girl -
Bio
Ashley Carey is a New Mexican artist based in Colorado, whose work examines female objectification and empowerment through surrealist oil painting. Drawing on personal experience, dialogue with women, and a Catholic upbringing, Carey integrates iconographic foundations with contemporary collaging methods to develop a distinct visual language. Their work has been exhibited at the Art Center of Western Colorado, 437Co Gallery, and the Carlsbad Art Museum. Carey has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art with a minor in Art History, and pursuing her painting career.