Audrey With Ring Pop, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, heavy resin

Ashley Longshore is a painter and mixed media artist inspired by contemporary pop culture. The artist’s works take a playful, sometimes vulgar, often feminine-oriented approach to the concerns of young people navigating today’s culture.

Bottle Fed with Lavender Floral Background, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, heavy resin

I like the way that Longshore’s approaches her subject matter in a frank, humorous way. Her paintings -- detailed and elegantly rendered in slightly gestural but saturated brush marks -- often combine imagery of flowers, jewels, and familiar faces with text elements spelling out very unfiltered slogans and phrases. Many of these works seem to address a sense of opulence seen through a satirical filter -- a classic image of Audrey Hepburn includes the addition of a Ring Pop headdress; a painting of three bottles of expensive champagne includes the words “Bottle Fed” in cursive font.

Longshore’s use of colour and pop-culture figures reminds me a bit of work by Amber Petersen. Longshore also works in sculpture, producing, among other items, cakes with humorously crass slogans on them -- a far cry form Scott Hove’s terrifying pasrty sculptures, but equally fun.

I'm Sorry I Threw Up In Your Birkin, cake sulpture