The title of Ashley Wick’s exhibition is deliberately paradoxical: personal experience is, by definition, what eludes direct communication. And yet it is precisely this paradox that the American artist, born in 1987, seeks to explore — how can one share what is most intimate, most fragile, most elusive? How can vulnerability be given form without being betrayed?

Ashley Wick works with techniques that play on repetition and reactivation: animation that revives frozen gestures, sculpted objects that bear the trace of earlier use, sounds that emerge from silences. Her works create a strange sensation of familiarity mingled with estrangement — as if one recognised something without being able to name it. This ambiguity is the very site of her work: she is interested in the way meaning emerges, always provisionally, always partially, from the encounter between a work and the person looking at it. The assumed awkwardness and deliberate naïvety of some of her pieces are strategies to disarm the viewer, to create a space where truth can be spoken obliquely, by way of detour.

Galerie Charlot presents the first exhibition in France of the artist Ashley Wick (born 1987 in the United States), following her artist residency organised by the gallery.

This young artist explores the depths of vulnerability, fragility, nostalgia and fear through the dynamic interplay between painting, sculpture, animation, language, story and sound. She plays with techniques that allow her to continually animate and reanimate processes and experiences, to reveal the emergent nature of meaning and to uncover the awkwardness and humour that echo our vulnerabilities.

In her animations she questions the dimensions of trust and expectation in relationships ranging from the intimacy between loved ones to the kinship between humans and animals, and on to the immense mystery between the individual and the universe. She combines rhythmic spoken couplets with songs to draw the viewer into a hypnotic, immersive experience. To evoke and facilitate this immersion, her playfully presented animations are often structured as short loops made up of repetitive images and poetic, metaphorical language, which develops a new meaning with each cycle.