ASHLIN McANDREW STUDIO











         


DVI Clay Coil Pot
Discarded DVI and HDMI cords, wire,
15" x 14"
202
Cable Coil Baskets
discarded usb and ethernet cords





PreTense
This collection examines the fractured relationship between American identity, technological progress, and the natural world through the radical repurposing of discarded materials—plastic plants, decommissioned fire hoses, obsolete electronics, and discarded flags. The plastic plants serve as a central metaphor: artificial reproductions of life created by a culture that simultaneously fears and destroys what it attempts to replicate.

Traditional craft techniques—quilting, coiling, weaving—are applied to contemporary detritus, creating tension between methods rooted in cultural memory and materials born from industrial amnesia. The recurring imagery of American symbols (flags, founding fathers, maps) rendered in waste speaks to a nation that has become what it consumes: fragmented, divisible, synthetic, and increasingly unable to sustain the weight of its own contradictions.

The work traces a genealogy of disconnection beginning with colonial foundations and extending into current ecological and social crises, asking: What does it mean to build a nation on the promise of liberty while systematically destroying connection—to earth, to community, to culture, to each other? These pieces occupy a space of incompleteness and liminality, reflecting systems many inherently don't fit into, and a moment where the word "indivisible" rings increasingly hollow.