Her work is a festering wound, celebrating its grotesqueness.
Salem Ashe (b. 1981, Saginaw, MI) is a lens, text, and sound-based artist living in Los Angeles, California whose work engages with themes of abjection, the subconscious, and the monstrous feminine. Her creations utilize experimental methods, often bathing the viewer in soft, disseminating pixels, liminal spaces, nightmarish sounds, jarring jump cuts, and beings immersed in disgust. Her confrontational storytelling explores human suffering and psychological dark corridors through visceral imagery and atmospheric tension. What presents are a series of obsessions, compulsions, and cathartic transgressions, captured on film in symbolic and surrealist strokes.
Ashe received her MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Davis in 2024, and her BFA in Studio Art from Michigan State University in 2021. Ashe’s work has been exhibited at the Manetti Shrem Museum, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, the historic Hera Gallery, and the Atelierhaus of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She has received the prestigious Fay Nelson Award, as well as the Robert Arneson Award, and was an Art Purchase Prize Finalist. Her photography was a winner at the 2024 Rotlicht Festival for Analogue Photography, and her video work has received Honorable Mentions from both the Experimental Forum Film Festival, and the LA Underground Film Forum.
Her work has been commissioned by Simon & Schuster, Complex magazine, LaunchLeft, and Hozac Records, among others.