Ashley Billingsley, Fire in Woods I, Pencil on Drafting Film, 15″ x 24″, 2011

My work examines the inadequacy of the senses in deciphering direct experience. Fire in Woods I-IV are inspired by a scene in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film, Seven Samurai. The drawings depict the eve of battle, when the underdogs await enemy invasion in a landscape that mirrors their uncertainty.

Ashley Billingsley, Fire in Woods II, Pencil on Drafting Film, 15″ x 24″, 2012

It’s too dark to know what’s really out there, so conjecture picks up where the senses leave off. Despite the ways we mark and measure it, our position in the external world is unclear and limitations of mind and body render the most basic features mysterious. I think of this precondition of humanness as the larger theme in my work, and use landscape as a vehicle for exploring the implications.

Ashley Billingsley, Fire in Woods III, Pencil on Drafting Film, 15″ x 24″, 2013

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Ashley Billingsley is in this for the long-haul, grinding out opportunities for herself and a small crew of artists whose work she admires. You may have caught her work over the last few years in exhibtions at GASP (Brookline), Gallery 51 (North Adams), and in the well received Beyond Purview at the New Art Center, which she also organized. If you are of the jet-set, Ashley and her work will be venturing to Cambodia this next year to take part in On the Streets, an exhibition sponsored by apexart.

Ashley Billingsley Fire in Woods IV, Pencil on Drafting Film, 15″ x 24″, 2013