KIMBERLY

[00:01:10] Welcome back, listeners. Thanks again for tuning in to this week's episode of Art Uncovered. This week I am so excited to be here with Brooklyn based artist Ash Hagerstrand. Ash, thanks for joining us. 

ASH

Yeah, super happy to be here.

KIMBERLY

So I'd love to start by talking about your work. So your work seems to exist in kind of two worlds, one which is the physical world of sculpture and then the other world is digital, A collage of moving images, maybe, and we'll get into the aesthetics of your work in a bit, but to start, I'd love to know a little bit about some of the themes that you explore.

[00:01:41] While looking at your work, I saw an interesting reference to, and I put quotes around this work, so I don't love it, but I think it does a good job of describing your work–”dismembered body parts” Yeah, it just seems a little criminal to use the word dismembered but there's a lot of floating hands and feet that aren't attached to other limbs.So let's start there. What does this reference come from? 

ASH

Yeah, so my work is primarily focused on the connections between ritual and consumerism particularly within the context of online wellness communities. A big starting point for this project was Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto like so many projects have to do with digital work, but the Cyborg, what I liked about it is I feel like we're all augmented in a way we're all always interfacing with technology more and more now that sort of creates this cyborg being, and what she was proposing was this blending of human machine, natural and like constructed culture as a way to transcend binaries enforced by oppressive systems. And then she also in the same essay proposes that disabled folks are 

Oh, also I'm a disabled person, so I should mention that. So a lot of references to disability in my work, she proposes that disabled people have this natural predisposition to being cyborgian.

[00:03:02] But she doesn't explore the idea too much, but it was something that I was definitely interested in when I read it. I feel like. Disabled people have this complicated relationship with technology, especially when it augments the body. I think we are always dreaming about technology that sort of pushes the boundaries of organic living.

[00:03:22] But the reality of it is when we see people whose bodies are heavily augmented by technology, it often causes discomfort as society struggles to reconcile the intersection of organic and artificial. And a lot of my jumping off point for the project is the question. Why is that? Like, when placed in practice, why is the suborgan body so uncomfortable for people or disquieting?

[00:03:49] And I think that the conclusion I came to was that our positive relationship with technology sort of relies on very heavily on associations with health and wellness, even purity and cleanliness, all things that society doesn't necessarily associate with disability. This is especially prevalent in a society that values able bodiedness and sees disability as a malfunction and therefore the opposite of what we think of when we think of technology augmenting us.

KIMBERLY

[00:04:20] Before we, we go on, I just want to clarify a couple of terms that you use there for listeners who might not know. So it's cyborgian. Can you explain what this is? 

ASH

Yeah, so it's like a creature that's sort of a human body that's been interwoven with, technology augmented with technology in a way that's like totally transcended humanity or organic living. If your brain is uploaded into the cloud or one day for all mechanical body parts. mostly, except for our brains and this sort of blending of how we've become technological, how we evolved with technology, plus how technology evolves us, sort of thing. 

KIMBERLY

Do you think this exists in today's world yet?

ASH

[00:05:07] Oh, definitely. Yeah. 

KIMBERLY

In what ways? I think that, for one, we're constantly attached to our phones. I know that we don't usually think of that as augmenting our bodies, but the fact that I can't walk around New York without my phone in my hand constantly connected to the internet more extreme, versions of this is maybe like the idea of implanting chips and brains, which I know Tesla is working on which is very interesting. And then, just in everyday, like a lot of disabled people were augmented by technology. We're connected to like things that keep us alive, machines that keep us alive.

[00:05:44] And then even though we don't think of like a wheelchair or mechanical body part as the ideal Way in which people are quote unquote the ideal way in which technology has pushed our wellness culture I think that it's like a primary way that we exist as cyborg creatures if that makes sense 

KIMBERLY

Wonderfully said. You you also mentioned online wellness communities. I'm wondering if you could explain what this community is and maybe your involvement with it?

ASH

[00:06:16] Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think So as a teenager, I was like constantly sick and missing School and stuck in the house a lot. And so I have a lot of nostalgic memories of being very entrenched in online wellness communities during that time already trying to figure out like Oh, I have stomach issues.

[00:06:36] How can I detox that? I feel like, especially when I was growing up, that was so prevalent. It still is, like fitness influencers are a huge thing. So I would move in and out of these micro online wellness communities in search of fixing myself. I'm also from California, which I think that feeds into it a lot where there is very specific wellness culture in California that goes back to the 1800s. Even the architecture in California has a lot to do with wellness culture. 

KIMBERLY

How so?

ASH

If you go to Southern California, you'll notice that a lot of the houses and architecture are very window heavy and it's because during the development period of those in the 1970s, there was this huge movement about sunlight helping the body Especially bodies that struggle with chronic illness.

[00:07:27] And then California also has this huge history with sanitariums sending people places to regain their wellness because the air is dry because there's sun because we're near the water. So you can find a lot of those in California. I think it's really interesting and I think that's also why we have an awful history with eugenics. I don't know if you know much about California’s history.

KIMBERLY

No, I don't. 

ASH

Well, California had one of the biggest eugenics programs in the United States specifically targeting disabled people and then people of color. So much so that it inspired Germany when they were. It's a very not well known thing about California because you don't think of California like that.

[00:08:11] But I think that there's definitely an undercurrent of that unavoidability within the way wellness culture works in California. 

KIMBERLY

So I cut you off in order to ask you those follow up questions, but I think you were starting to go into your sculptures and maybe how these ideas manifest in your artwork.

ASH

[00:08:28] Yeah, I think about my sculptural body parts, which are all 3D printed. And I like to think of them actually as like a reanimated digital corpses. So you calling them dismembered body parts was actually perfect. I'm very interested in how we translate our bodies from the interweb and seeing what glitches man manifest when we do that transfer from digital art to physical space.

[00:09:00] I'm drawing a lot from Legacy Russell's glitch feminism, which is celebrated as like this vehicle of refusal and a strategy for non-performance as a vehicle for empowerment, which I think is very. applicable to disability rights.

[00:09:20] But if you look at my pieces up close in person at first they look like sculptural, maybe they could have been cast, but you get closer and you can see the lines of the 3D printing and then also these weird dots and digital glitches or like where the machine messed up and the translation between Digital and physical wasn't quite correct, which I really enjoy about them.

KIMBERLY

[00:09:53] I'd like to do a screen share here. What space is this one currently in?

ASH

Yeah So this was shown Art. They're a newer gallery in brooklyn They're fantastic, especially for new media artists. I would definitely recommend everybody check them out.

During pride month they had awesome events with which is really nice. But yeah, this piece definitely references shrine making. I think that ritual is really important to how we think about wellness. And I'm definitely interested in that ritual. I think there's like a radical element to ritual care that's very soothing.

[00:10:58] I also think of my work almost as altar making. This one is called Veronica's Veil. I don't know if you know much about like Christian art or anything like that. 

KIMBERLY

I should I went to catholic school my whole life, but I don't.

ASH

Okay, it's okay. This is a niche one. It's at some point during the stations of the cross– Jesus, he stumbles and Veronica like Wipes his hands her veil to wipe his face and then his face, which magically transmuted onto the veil that she's holding. 

Yeah, so thinking a lot about Skincare and the fabric, which is so hard to photograph, but it is like a latex that skin tone looks like skin. And people are always like, Oh, wow, that looks so much more like skin in person.

[00:11:46] I've yet to photograph it correctly. And thinking about like faces wiping the, I think what's so interesting about that story, not only is like the miracle of the transmutation of the face or, but really the active care of wiping a face, especially a face that's like struggling and in pain, and how we are so obsessed with skincare in a way.

[00:12:12] That can also act as like a ritual to calm ourselves after a long day, if that makes sense. 

KIMBERLY

One other theme that I noticed in your work is it seems like a lot of the references to body parts are feminine in nature. Is this a true observation? 

ASH

I think that is such like an interesting question for me, because it's something that I think about a lot.

[00:12:37] On one hand, I feel like within the digital realm, we have this power to curate and shape our identities, which is really powerful to reflect on– like our innermost thoughts and our desires. However, I think that the internet is also a place that's become very algorithm-driven and sort of an echo chamber for our own biases and beliefs.

[00:12:57] I'm always interested in the ways that oppression or bias can be fed into our digital landscape. I think that a lot of experience online has a lot of constant personal optimization woven into the undertone of what we're consuming. Constant reminders to like tone, moisturize, cleanse, so on. However, I have been like seeing it more and more in masc spaces as well now, surrounding things like mogging or like the popularization of like incel language or biohacking.
KIMBERLY

I am so sorry but don't know any of those words!

ASH

Oh, my god!  I just felt very chronically online. 

KIMBERLY

So what was the first word you used? Mogging? 

ASH

Yeah. Mogging is like…So it comes from like this community online that's, oh my god, I'm going to describe this so poorly.

[00:13:51] They're really obsessed with looks maxing. I've found that it's mostly like a masc community, so they're very obsessed with shaping their jaw lines to be very strong or that very chiseled, almost handsome Squidward look.

[00:14:10] And mogging is when you're like next to someone doing looking more attractive, basically, like showing them off by looking more attractive in a way. Also, like a lot of times there's like tongue exercises where you have to hold your tongue in a certain way to make your jawline look really nice. 

KIMBERLY

Oh my gosh.

ASH

[00:14:29] So mogging meets are always like, heavily filtered men, looking very attractive. 

KIMBERLY

Wow. What is your your perception or take on this? 

ASH

[00:14:49] I think that what I find insidious about femme experience, is that the ideas of optimizing ourselves into these fittest, cleanest, prettiest version of us it's so common that it's unremarkable. I feel like people always comment really heavily on incel culture.

[00:15:10] Or the idea of looks maxing, but some folks have been like look maxing and biohacking for decades and it's just expected of us and it's not even notable. So I find that very interesting. 

KIMBERLY

So one of the questions that I had planned for you was so I noticed when looking in your work, you had references to women in medical spaces. I wonder if you could elaborate on this for us?

ASH

Yeah, I never stop talking about it, so I was so excited to answer this question. I think that a lot of it springs from my own experiences of a femme- presenting person navigating medical spaces, which is always difficult. But I think that book that really radicalized me on this subject, which I recommend everyone read, is Doing Harm by Maya Dusenberry.

[00:15:57] And then just to quote the book:

“Women wait 65 minutes to men's 49 before getting treatment for abdominal pain in the emergency room. Young women are seven times more likely to be sent home from the hospital in the middle of having a heart attack.

[00:16:15] Women face long delays, often years long, to get diagnosed, even with diseases that are quite common in women, and they experience longer diagnostic delays in comparison to men for nearly everything from brain tumors to rare genetic disorders.

Whenever you hear a condition described as quote unquote contested, The odds are good that the contest is between on one hand, the mostly women patients who believe their condition to be organic, and on the other hand, a medical establishment that assumes their medically unexplained symptoms are all in their heads.”

KIMBERLY

[00:16:48] That's awful. 

ASH

Yeah. And the way it feeds back into my work, I feel like there's this huge industry that sort of targets people like me. And it understands that Western medicine often fails us. AndI feel like also the self care obsession speaks to the radical comfort of ritual in the face of uncertainty provided by often sexist and racist medical system because the stats for white women are bad, but the stats for women of color are even worse.
[00:17:18] Especially surrounding childbirth, like the childbirth process for women of color is, I don't want to pull a fake stat out of my head, but it's significantly worse. You're much more likely to die During childbirth as a woman in color in the United States, which is appalling. It shouldn't be happening and a lot of that is surrounding these medical myths around black women not feeling pain. And the disbelief of their pain can also often lead to like complications going untreated 

KIMBERLY

Have you experienced any of this mistreatment in your life?

ASH

Oh, yeah. SO I have lupus. I have moderate to severe lupus, which just means that it's affecting more than one organ system in me along with a dozen other disorders, but lupus is my big main one.

[00:18:12] It took me Lupus is extremely common in women. I will just preface it with that. It took me five to six years to get diagnosed. Even though I was having pretty obvious symptoms. I was misdiagnosed at one point with functional neurological disorder, which women are like three or four times likely to get diagnosed with, and it's a very nice way of saying that you have hysteria.

KIMBERLY

[00:18:36] Oh my gosh.

ASH

Yeah. I went to about five doctors before I finally got diagnosed and across many states. So part of, part of the thing that complicated it, of course, was I was young. Lupus often starts manifesting in people's late teens to early 20s.

[00:18:54] Mine started manifesting when I was 23. So I was in college, and so I was going back and forth between the East Coast and the West Coast, and then I moved to the Midwest, and I didn't get diagnosed until I moved to New York City. 

KIMBERLY

Does your personal experience make it into your work? 

ASH

Oh, I think that it informs so much of my work.

[00:19:15] I feel like the disbelief in my condition, taking so long to get diagnosed. Even at one point, I came in with neurological symptoms because my, I have, my lupus affects my central nervous system. I came to the hospital with severe neurological symptoms happening and they tested me for drugs without my consent, They did a full drug panel.

[00:19:40] I've got a lot of horror stories, but I think that sort of navigating the medical system as extensively as I have has deeply informed my work. I think that also like the immersion in wellness communities is something that happens so often to particularly women who are being ignored by the Western, the traditional Western medicine world.

[00:20:09] I think that can be a fantastic thing. I think that self care can be radical. I think that when we, Experience self care though through the primary mode of consumerism. I think that's when it becomes less radical and more problematic and also even more dangerous if that makes sense. 

KIMBERLY

It sounds like you advocated pretty hard for yourself by going to different doctors. I don't know if you had an innate belief that what they were telling you is wrong but do you have any suggestions for other women who might be going through something similar?

[00:20:46] Yeah, there's so much that you have to navigate within the medical system as a person who's femme. I think that the number one thing is learning to advocate for yourself which I know can be very difficult because you are. You go to a doctor, and especially if you don't have a lot of experience with the medical system, it's like the beginning of your journey, and you've always been taught to see them as like the end all be all of what's going on, even to the point where you start to discredit your own experience, like your own lived experience.

[00:21:17] Yeah. There were so many times where I was just like, am I just crazy? But I think learning to advocate for yourself, don't be afraid to get a second opinion. Like, I've gotten millions of blood tests before. My blood test came back in such a way that lupus was indicated in addition to my symptoms, which were very classically lupus.

[00:21:42] This is gonna go into a weird rant about cameras and diagnostic tools and stuff but I'm interested a lot in how we see diagnostic tools and diagnostic imaging as like a end all be all over experience. But in reality, it's only a capture, a little tiny sliver in a moment of time, and a million things can be affecting that. And I think that there's a lot of in France, like in France as a show, there's a much more articulated discussion on this, but I'm interested in the idea of Truth making and that a lot of my work sort in the beginning, especially with was born out of me trying to like, in a way, document my symptoms so that they would be real like getting a longer term capture of what I was experiencing.

[00:22:39] And I think that so much of what I was experiencing was also online because like I was Googling my symptoms and I actually thought I had lupus, I think, four years before I was diagnosed. Not that I kept pushing for a lupus diagnosis. There was another, a million other things it could have been because lupus is quite wide reaching.

But I was like, I think it's lupus, but everyone's telling me it's not. And then finally, five years later, my tests came back in such a way where, oh yeah, it is.

KIMBERLY

[00:23:11] At the beginning of our talk, I mentioned that your work seems to exist in multiple spaces, right? You have the gallery space where your sculptures exist, but you also have a heavy like online facet to, to your practice. I'm curious if maybe you could talk a bit about those differing spaces. Is there something you get from showing in a gallery space that you don't get from online and vice versa? 

ASH

Yeah, I think it's really cool that you noticed that because it's something I embarked on a year ago. I find that there's like this naturally engrossing experience, like naturally immersive experience, about encountering work on the internet.

[00:23:51] So when you encounter artwork within the context of the internet, you are primed to be immersed in the image or video or the artwork. But something I really struggled with showing in gallery spaces. is losing that natural immersion when the work is translated to in real life

[00:24:12] So a lot of my sculptural work was actually born out of that sort of frustration. I feel like I haven't found a way for sculptures to live online, though, and be as immersive as I like. So there's this constant push and pull that I'm interested in and struggling with between digital art, digital born art, and then the physical world.

[00:24:32] I don't think I have a preference for either, but I do love that sort of tension. 

KIMBERLY

Which did you start with? Did you start with sculpture or digital work? 

ASH

Digital art, definitely. I feel technically, I was a photographer first. I majored in photography, and something that I struggled a lot with in photography is, especially film photography, is this non control, I love things to be extremely controlled by me. It's part of my therapeutic process with art, I think. And so the reason I got into collage and then digital art was it was a way for me to completely construct the reality almost in a way that I couldn't do with photographs, or at least I couldn't do satisfactorily with photographs.

[00:25:19] Also, I'm just a person who's very interested in digital ideas as well, but I think that Yeah, that's starting that way was really cool. And then sculpture grew as a natural way to progress it and bring it into a more in person space, especially gallery spaces. I feel like when you encounter like a work on a TV screen in a gallery, it's not nearly as immersive as if you were like looking at it on Instagram or a website, if that makes sense. 

KIMBERLY

Did you feel pressured by the art world to make work that can be shown in a physical space? 

ASH

Not really. I feel like I don't make work that's necessarily easy to show in the art world. I don't think the sculptures have helped too much with how easy it is.

[00:26:15] I think that it wasn't necessarily the art world, but more the viewer, if that makes sense. There's an experience I want the viewer to have, and when it's in person, it lost that experience, and adding the sculptural work played into that tension, both conceptually and visually. 

KIMBERLY

Oh, do you mean if you only exhibited digital work without the sculptural element?

ASH

Yes

[00:26:37] Is your exhibiting digital work mostly screen based, or are there projections? 

ASH

I used to be a projection person. Now you're going to get like a bunch of stuff about me working in galleries. So I work in galleries fairly regularly. I'm currently the operations director at Apex Art for the next three days before I transition into another role.

[00:26:59] But, I have a lot of gallery installing experience and the way I wanted to work with projectors involved projection mapping, which is something you have to travel for basically because you can't expect a gallery attendant to projection map your work unless they just happen to be like a fantastic, the technically savvy gallery attendant.

[00:27:20] And I also, This is such a practical answer to your question but I also don't want to be that artist that, everybody dreads working with because their work is so fucking hard to set up. Excuse my English. So I always make my work as easy I think a lot about how to make my work transportable, easy to set.

KIMBERLY

[00:27:45] That is so wildly thoughtful. 

ASH

I think that media artists get a like a bad rap because it's so often the technology is malfunctioning. They're like people don't know how to Set up their work. It can be hard and I try to push against that a little bit. My work is very easy to set up.

[00:28:08] I recently had an install where I came in and the guy was like, Oh, do you need any help setting up? And I was like, absolutely not. It was actually for the Veronica's veil piece. I literally screwed three screws into the wall, hung my hands on it, put the TV against the thing, and had a media player ready to go, and it was like, he was like, wow, that was crazy easy.

KIMBERLY

[00:28:32] That's excellent. I did want to ask you, because I saw that you are the founder of the Chronically Online Gallery, is that the right title? 

ASH

Yep, that's it. 

KIMBERLY

Okay. What is this? What is Chronically Online? 

ASH

Yeah, so I haven't actually gotten to do Chronically Online for two years now because of my current position.

[00:28:53] It's a conflict of interest, but moving on to my new position, hopefully that I get to restart it up. Chronically Online Gallery was started in 2021 during the pandemic when a lot of online gallery spaces were cropping up and I was in an Online gallery show where their online space was so immersive that it looked real. I had like 20 people asking me if I was like for real showing in such a like large space with big work. And I got the idea from there like I think one of the biggest struggles especially if you have a a physical disability is hanging work on the wall to get good documentation.

[00:29:35] I think that's a big barrier in the art world. And so I had the idea to make a space that was very realistic and looked realistic enough that I could invite disabled and chronically ill artists in to have a digital show, but have documentation that was good enough to fool a committee, if that makes sense.

[00:29:54] And that way they can get more opportunities, but it became more than that in a really cool way. I watched a community spring up around it and I really enjoyed seeing everybody's career go on from there, and I still follow a lot of those artists. So it's been really,

KIMBERLY

Was this space created with AI? 

ASH

No,  I'm going to plug in a website here. It's const matrix. They do these online gallery spaces. I'm sure they thrived during the pandemic.

[00:30:35] They can make you, they can build you a 3d space and host gallery shows. You can get custom spaces. They also have templates. I was using a template at the time I was looking into yeah, there it is. If you just edit it just right, it looks real enough.

KIMBERLY

[00:30:57] Very exciting. I hope your new position allows you to be able to to restart this. So my last question for you–do you have any upcoming shows or something like this that we could promote for you? 

ASH

Yeah, I should be in Opulent Mobility this year. Opulent Mobility is this online going thing.

[00:32:07] Laura Brody runs that. I've participated since 2021 and it's an annual thing. It's disabled artists making work sort of celebrating disability. I feel like a lot of work that gets shown from disabled artists often has thIS sad overtone to it. So something I really appreciated about Opium at Mobility is how celebratory it is.

KIMBERLY

[00:32:33] Oh, that's wonderful. Ash, thank you so much for this conversation and for your work. You're a brilliant speaker. And yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate your time and your work. And. Yeah. Thank you. 

ASH

Yeah. Thank you