Life and Work with Ashley Hagen

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashley Hagen.

Ashley, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My two passions as a kid growing up were making art and decorating my dollhouse. I grew up in Ames, Iowa. My dad owned a gas station and my mom had an interior design business called Hagen House Interiors. She even had a big white van with Rainbow lettering with the business name on it that was usually full of carpet, wallpaper and fabric samples. As I would look through my mom’s wallpaper and fabric samples, I kept redecorating my dollhouse every few months. Velvet fabric made for excellent carpet and most of the wallpapers came with a large print and matching small print so the small print was perfect for the dollhouse walls. I think being surrounded by my moms business and creativity really fostered my imagination and later, both the dollhouse and interior design would become a huge part of my life and work.

After high school, I attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I focused mainly on painting and printmaking. I moved to Los Angeles in 2002. Around that time, I visited a friend who bought a fixer-upper house. I started suggesting all these things that could be done with the house and he said, “you seem like you know what you are doing, I’ll hire you to design my house.” For very little money, I designed that house which leads to another job and another when I realized I’d fallen into becoming a designer. I opened my interior design business Mod Décor in 2004 and continues to this day. At the same time, I started my business I was still making art, but I always kept my art and my design business separate until the two collided when I started the grad program at California State University Northridge in 2010. While in grad school, I spent six months making a dollhouse from scratch that would continue to influence my work to this day.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I don’t think art should be a smooth road, you need to dig into deep and sometimes uncomfortable areas for vision. I graduated from CSUN in 2012 and immediately had a steady stream of opportunities to show my work in solo and group shows. At that time, I was producing a lot of work. In 2014, I gave birth to my son. It has always been a dream for me to be a mother and I was over the moon to have this opportunity. It was also really scary for me since I had several people tell me I would no longer make art once I had a baby. This was a huge fear for me, making art is what I have known my entire life and I was terrified at the idea of losing this. I remember when he was less than a month old getting a little 9” x 9” wooden panel that I could draw on while I nursed so that I would at least be making something.

In 2016, my daughter was born. I no longer had the fear I wouldn’t be able to be an artist, a mother, and a business owner, but the challenge of time, now with two kids, has been my greatest challenge but also my greatest motivation. I had to let go of needing to produce tons of work as I was before kids, but I’m still making large-scale works that take a little more time than before. My kids love to come to the studio to see what I’m working on and I try and involve them in as much of my work as I can. My latest sculpture “Home Is” I built stairs leading to a cluster of miniature architectural elements. Playing under the stairs was one of my favorite things as a kid, so I gave each one of my kids some paint and a brush and let them paint under the stairs so they could have a part in my work. My kids also love playing with my tape measure and looking at paint swatches, and building material samples. Including my kids in my process as well as using time wisely has helped with these challenges, but it is still a difficult balance to juggle!

Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
When I started building the dollhouse in grad school, I painted all the parts white and photographed the process along the way. The house captured ambient light to create the illusion of a human scale space and resembled some of the client projects I was working on. I wanted these photos to look more real so I fabricated flooring, miniature heating vents, light fixtures, outlets to foster this illusion. Upon completion of the dollhouse, I jackhammered into the gallery floor and partially buried the foundation of the dollhouse and encased it in resin. I left the subtracted concrete rubble on the gallery floor for the duration of the exhibition.

To de-install, I cut the house from the gallery floor to release the exposed part of the house from the resin. Removing the house was emotionally difficult; I had spent the previous six months nurturing this house into being only to destroy it. I had to let go. I ended up saving a lot of the rubble from the floor and when I sawed the house from the resin a lot of the house stayed intact. Parts of the windows broke off, and doors from the interior. I ended up using the rubble and the broken parts in several works to come. The remains of the dollhouse became the top of a 14-foot pallet tower I made for my thesis show. From afar, it looked like a giant stack of pallets but as you get closer there were miniature worlds inside created from destroying all the earlier work that I made during my two years of grad school, and repurposing them into new work. After grad school, the pallets became two smaller sculptures. One was covered in molding and painted white, resembling a giant wedding cake. And the other looked like a colorful minimal cube from afar, but as you get closer, it looks like large LEGOs and then closer you see they are miniature shipping containers. In the interiors, I recreate places I have been, lived in or dreamt about.

Currently, the remains of the house are inside a glass cabinet I bought for a client and then the client changed their mind so I turned it into art. I bricked the outside with miniature bricks and made windows to resemble a building I lived in Chicago, and when you open it up there is the dollhouse remains from grad school as well as other levels of apartments I have lived in and miniature recreations from childhood homes I grew up in. It’s a house within a house within a house. The base is made of stuffed animals coated in plaster and painted gold as well as a vent to represent a childhood memory of listening through the vent to listen to my parents talking in the room below. My work deals with scale, memory, and imagination. I love to reward the viewer by giving them something more if they take the time to look. Most of my work has a hidden element that one can discover by taking the time to really look closely. Kids usually figure this stuff out first. I love when a child discovers something hidden as the parents are asking them to step back from the piece and then the parents discover through the child’s eye. I recycle a lot of my work as well, parts break and that becomes something for another piece.

The photographing of the work has become as much a part of the work as the sculpture. I like to play with illusion by creating trompe-l’oeil paintings, an art technique that uses realistic imagery and rendering in order to create an optical illusion of realness. These paintings sometimes are all that remains of work; they become the portrait painting of the object containing the memories. I created a series of drywall paintings that look like slabs of concrete. These paintings are from places the work once stood. One of the 8’ x 4’ concrete paintings I cut in half and used as the sides of a sculpture I made titled “Between thick walls” again playing with illusion, from afar it looks like a minimalist sculpture, concrete square but as you get closer the sides are filled with colorful miniature worlds. The top is a thick piece of glass with a mirror and I recreated elements of the gallery ceiling so when you look inside in the space the gallery is reproduced both big and small and the reflection can be seen looking in the mirror and through the glass.

Who have you been inspired by?
My mom and my late grandma (my mom’s mom), have greatly inspired me in my life. They both set strong examples of how to be a working mom, they both started a business from scratch and when things didn’t work out they tried again and again. They are both extremely smart, creative, and passionate about life.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ashleyhagen.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: ashleyhagen_

Image Credit:
Ashley Hagen, [email protected]

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