Morgan Ashcom: Distortions: Recent Works and Fictional Directions in Photography

Untitled #10 (2010), archival pigment print, 24" x 30”.
Morgan Ashcom is an artist and educator living in New York City. Although he lives in a major metropolitan area his work is influenced by the Virginia landscape around the farm where he grew up. His first photobook, Leviathan, emerged from his experience at a remote community in southeast Ohio. While the photographs were made in the rolling hills of Appalachia, Ashcom followed themes of escape and confrontation on the sea suggesting a narrative where these worlds have converged. Since the completion and publication of Leviathan, he has been photographing an ongoing project titled What the Living Carry. Through a fictional and subjective photographic account, What the Living Carry draws on the motif of the forest as a canvas for collective subconscious projections rooted in the literature and archetypes of rural America.