Surface & Gesture: A Conversation with Ash Kolodner

In this exclusive conversation with Miami Living Magazine, artist Ash Kolodner reflects on a creative journey that moves from the precision of photography to the visceral, layered language of painting. Now presenting Surface and Gesture at ArtLAB in North Miami, Kolodner returns to Miami with a body of work that is both deeply personal and expansively open – exploring themes of identity, perception, and becoming. Rooted in a period of profound transformation, his work invites viewers into a space where meaning is not fixed, but felt – where abstraction and embodiment meet, and where attention itself becomes the subject.

Miami Living (ML): Welcome, Ash. Before we dive into Surface and Gesture, can you share a little about where you are in life right now and what’s been feeling most present for you lately?

ASH: I’m in a period of what I’d call “deep integration.” The last several years have asked a lot of me, not only as an artist, but as a person moving more fully into alignment with who I am and want to be. I’ve been thinking a lot about transformation and the many selves we carry inside us: how identity is lived, how the body carries history, and how perception shifts when one begins to inhabit truth more completely.

More and more, I’m drawn to things that don’t resolve cleanly – those in-between spaces, the thresholds, the moments of transition. That’s become a real throughline in my work, both philosophically and formally. I’m less interested in certainty or neat and tidy conclusions and moreso in what it means to be present, and in that emotional charge of “becoming.” That sensibility is very much at the core of Surface and Gesture.

Posture Wrap

ML: You began your creative journey behind the lens. What did painting unlock for you that photography couldn’t, and how did that shift transform your relationship to image-making?

ASH: Photography taught me rigor. It taught me how to look, how to frame, and how to understand the emotional voltage of surface and light. But painting opened a far less fixed space — one in which meaning could remain mobile, unstable, and embodied. Even the most expansive photographic work still carries a tether to the visible world. Painting loosened that tether.

What it really opened up for me was a way of working that comes before language. I could just move through sensation – pressure, rhythm, accumulation, interruption – without needing to explain it. I started letting contradictions exist instead of trying to resolve them into a clear image. And I think my focus shifted too: from asking what an image depicts to asking what it holds… what it transmits in the body, what you feel before your mind steps in and tries to organize it.

Flawed Murmurs

ML: You’ve mentioned that you work exclusively with a brayer rather than a brush. That’s a striking choice. What does that constraint give you?

ASH: Yeah, I mean, the brayer isn’t just a tool I use – it really shapes how the work happens. It creates this very physical relationship between my body, the tool, and the surface. It’s about pressure, drag, rhythm, release… not so much about describing something. A brush feels more controlled, more precise. With the brayer, you’re distributing paint across a roller, so the gesture becomes broader, more embodied, more committed. You can’t really fuss over it or overwork it.

And that limitation is actually what makes it feel honest to me. I can’t hide in detail. The painting either comes together through instinct and accumulation, or it doesn’t. Over time, that’s become a kind of trust – trust in the gesture itself, and in the idea that the work can arrive somewhere real without being overly worked or refined into it.

ML: GAYFACE 1st Class was an ambitious and deeply human project — 500 portraits, nine states, ultimately a published book. What did that experience give you, and how did it shape you as an artist moving forward?

ASH: GAYFACE really changed how I think about portraiture. It’s not just about capturing what someone looks like – it’s about permission, about trust, about what it means to be seen and to be witnessed. Photographing so many queer and trans people across the country, I saw this incredible range of lives and experiences, but also this shared complexity around visibility – how powerful it can be, how tender, and sometimes how risky.

It also shifted how I think about the role of art. I wasn’t just making portraits – I was part of something more collective, like contributing to an archive of queer life. That feels especially important right now, when trans lives are so often treated as if they’re new or somehow abstract. They’re not. We’ve always been here – across time, across cultures. Holding onto that continuity feels really central to the work.

And I think there’s always this tension around visibility. It can absolutely carry risk – that’s real. But invisibility has its own kind of harm. So the work becomes a way of saying: we’re here, we’ve always been here, and our lives are far more expansive than the narrow ways they’re often framed.

Galactic Fallace

ML: Surface and Gesture began alongside your gender transition — a period when you needed a medium that could hold what language couldn’t. How did painting allow you to process aspects of that experience that felt inaccessible through words or photography?

ASH: I think for me, transition was never something that could be summed up just as identity. It was – and is – temporal, physical, psychic, relational… all of it at once. And there were parts of that experience that language could get close to, but not really hold. Words tend to push toward clarity before you’re actually ready to be clear. Painting doesn’t ask for that.

So I found myself turning to painting because it could hold more. Through layering, gesture, density, color – I could stay inside that complexity without having to explain it. I didn’t need to narrate the experience for it to be there.

Abstraction, especially, let me get closer to something true. It could be both reflective and permeable at the same time – like a mirror, but also something you can move through. It gave me a way to register that sense of instability and vitality, that feeling of becoming, without reducing it to something fixed or illustrative.

Cocoon Heist

ML: Do you remember the first painting where you thought: something is genuinely shifting here?

ASH: Yeah – it wasn’t some big, dramatic shift. It was actually pretty quiet. I just remember realizing at a certain point that I wasn’t trying to make an image in the usual way anymore. I was trying to create an encounter. And that felt like the real turning point. 

After that, I stopped feeling like the painting had to resolve into something clearly legible for it to be true. It just needed to have its own internal necessity. Once that clicked, I started trusting abstraction in a different way – trusting intuition, accumulation, the intelligence of gesture. It felt like the painting could know something before I had the words for it.

Lil Monster

ML: The titles of your works — Cocoon Heist, Petty in Pink, Under the Mango Trees, Self Betray — feel poetic and elusive. How do language and paint make meaning together in your practice, and where do they resist one another?

ASH: I tend to think of titles more like openings, or apertures, than explanations. They’re not there to tell you what the work means (though they sometimes do that), and ideally they don’t shut anything down (thought they also sometimes do that as well). It’s more that the titles shift the emotional tone a little – introducing something like irony, or tenderness, or even a kind of fracture. I think titles can act like a kind of nudge how someone enters the painting without telling them how to read it.

Petty in Pink is a good example of that. The painting was never about being ‘pretty’ in a conventional sense – it was more about brightness that has weight, emotion that takes up space. And the title kind of pivots on that – “petty” not as a flaw, but almost as a stance. A small insistence that actually holds. For me, as someone who never really identified with that idea of being “pretty in pink,” it feels a bit like a wink, but also a reclaiming.

And more broadly, I think paint and language just do really different things. Language often wants to pin things down, make them stable. Paint doesn’t have to do that – it can hold contradiction, excess, things that don’t fully resolve, and still feel completely articulate. So I’m interested in the title and the painting being in conversation, but not one explaining the other. That tension between them is actually where something interesting happens.

Under the Mango Trees

ML: You spent years working at the intersection of luxury fashion — Milk Studios during Fashion Week, agency modeling for Miu Miu, editorial work for Elle and Marie Claire to name a few. Do you think that world shaped your eye as a painter in ways you can identify?

ASH: Yeah, definitely… just maybe not in the most obvious or expected ways. Working in luxury fashion taught me about surface as a concept – how texture, color, proportion, tension all come together to provoke a reaction or create a feeling. There’s a real discipline to that world, and I think I absorbed a lot of that, even when I was still inside it and not necessarily thinking about it critically.

What I brought into painting is this sense that surface isn’t superficial at all. Every choice – color, gesture, whether you add something or hold back – carries weight. It affects how something is felt and perceived. At its best, fashion understands that. Painting does too. The difference is that with painting, I get to decide what the surface is doing – what it’s in service of.

Self Betray

ML: Returning to Miami with this exhibition, after Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012, feels like a full-circle moment. What does it mean to present this body of work here now?

ASH: Miami’s actually been part of a few different chapters for me. The first time I showed there was back in 2012 – I did this live painting presentation called Art Metamorphosis. It was this monochromatic installation with a mannequin, plywood panels, clothing… a whole environment. Looking back, it feels like I was already circling ideas around transformation, surface, and embodiment – I just didn’t have the same language for it yet.

I’ve come back in different ways since then – photographing GAYFACE at Orgullo Miami, spending time at The Betsy for a writing residency, showing work through the Writer’s Room. So being back now doesn’t really feel nostalgic; it feels more like a continuation. Like I’m returning with a clearer sense of what I was reaching toward all along.

This exhibition also felt vulnerable in a different way, because I started painting without any formal technical background whatseover. Putting that work out publicly was honestly pretty nerve-wracking. There’s a particular kind of exposure in sharing something that’s so intuitive, so personal, and still relatively new within your practice. So, to have people meet the work so openly and seeing them respond in a really visceral way was incredibly reaffirming for me. It reminded me that the work doesn’t have to be explained to be felt.

I’m also deeply grateful to Herb Sosa, Unity Coalition and ArtLab for creating space not just for the show, but for what it represents more broadly. As a trans artist, that kind of support really matters. Especially right now, when trans lives are being threatened or treated as if they’re new or up for debate, which they’re not. Transgenderism has always existed throughout humanity and history. And choosing to be visible, even in the face of what’s going on right now, is a way of insisting on our humanity and our right to exist.

Pierced Linen

ML: What do you hope people carry with them after experiencing Surface and Gesture?

ASH: I think more than anything, I hope people leave feeling a little more open: to themselves, to ambiguity, to emotion, to change. I’m not really interested in everyone landing on one fixed interpretation or takeaway. It’s more that the work should give you permission to feel before you try to name or categorize it… to sit with complexity instead of rushing to make it clear. 

And I hope there’s a kind of felt understanding that comes through – that transformation isn’t always neat or easily resolved, nor does it have to be defined. But that the concept of transformation can still be beautiful and very embodied.

Especially right now, I hope the work quietly insists on something bigger – that trans lives are human lives, that we’re not a trend or an abstraction or, worse, something to fear…that we’ve always been part of culture and history. And if someone walks away feeling a little more open, a little more attentive, more willing to sit in their own in-between… then I feel like the work has done something meaningful. 

Passive Harmony

ML: Finally — what’s next for you? Is there a direction the work is pulling you toward?

ASH: I feel like the work is asking me to go further inward, but at the same time, somehow further outward too. Most recently,  I’ve been really interested in scale and, specifically, what happens when these emotional spaces get big enough to actually surround and immerse you. I keep coming back to this tension between restraint and release. It still feels like something I don’t fully understand, but in a good way – like there’s more there to uncover.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about community and context where the work lives. What it means to show in spaces that welcome and might even prioritze queer and trans audiences, as well as spaces that don’t necessarily have that focus. Both feel important. I want my work to move and travel and to land in places where it can actually do something, maybe even change people in a real way. That’s the hope.

ashkolodner.com | @ashkolodner | ArtLAB Gallery, North Miami

By ML Staff. Images courtesy of Ash Kolodner