Ashley Lusietto presents Fell into the Honey, a sculptural exhibition featuring distorted self-portraits and alter egos of the artist. The figuration of Lusietto’s work manifests through exaggerated bodily features, garishly made-up faces, and exposed meaty flesh, resulting in vulnerable, direct forms. She found inspiration in ancient funerary processes, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the memory of receiving a box of brand new dolls in the mail as a child. This body of work made a twisted fairytale of her slow-burning nostalgias, set in a fantasy where the characters playfully blur the lines of alter-ego, inner child, feminine divine, and self portrait. In this cathartic reimagining of a lingering childhood, death becomes a catalyst for healing and preservation. To “fall into the honey” is euphemistic for dying. That sickly sweet liquid amber with its eternal shelf-life has been used for thousands of years in burial practices. Ancient honey-embalmed corpses laid to rest in tombs remain well preserved today. Lusietto uses honey metaphorically—to sweeten the taste of bitter remembering and to embalm the selves of the past.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this first presentation of artwork in ALL’s Livingston building will be available to view August 6-29, 2020, during limited gallery hours from 12-5pm Thursday through Saturday or by appointment. Visitors inside the building will be required to wear masks and practice social distancing, and the number of visitors will be limited according to current public health guidelines. The works will also be visible through the gallery windows, as an exhibition viewing experience from the outside.
Artist Statement:
There are things that I will never get over. The unsatisfied longings, eternal waiting, and engrained feminine self-consciousness that have plagued me since adolescence have not only lingered but collected strength enough to personify. Both self-portrait and mythical-being, the figures of my work embody the mixed feelings of remembering and fantasizing. In a dreamproduction where the characters are all played by me, I mythologize the autobiographical content of past and present. With fantastical figures—divine, childlike, animal, maternal, and more—and scenes informed by nostalgia and day dreams, I use painting and sculpture processes to create work that is genuine, disturbing, and amusing.
