Barksdale Restaurant, Madison Avenue Photograph - Limited Edition of 5

Ash Thayer a a photographer and multi-media visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work is held in several art collections including the Saatchi Gallery in London, Chicago Art Institute, The Ogden Museum and The Museum of the City of New York. She has taught art and photography at NYU, Columbia University and the University of Memphis. Her art practice poses questions about the experience of temporality and the presence of fantasy as storytelling agents, utilized in photography and film. By leveraging and exploiting the shifting nature of perception as it applies to consuming and interpreting images, the viewer is invited to reflect on their own presumptions, conjectures and verdicts. Her book Kill City: Lower East Side Squatters 1992-2000, published by powerhouse Books in 2015 consists of images and text from her time spent living in community with housing activists and squatters in 1990’s Lower East Side in NYC. Kill City earned significant attention, garnering dozens of articles, a book tour, panel discussions and presentations at The New York Mid-Manhattan Public Library and The Colloquium For Unpopular Culture at NYU. In 2016 her book was listed in American Photography Magazine’s list of top 10 photography books of the season. Thayer is in post-production for her film Metal Kills, an inquiry into the subculture and personal lives of its members who participate in the coed combat sport called Western Viking Fighting. The film is set in various locations in Denmark, shot between 2018 and 2023. A photographic and multi-media installation will accompany the film.