THE GARDEN REMEMBERS
ASHLEY MARIE + ALICIA BROWN
In The Garden Remembers, the figure and the natural world are not separate entities - they intertwine, echo, and evolve together. This exhibition brings the work of Ashley Marie and Alicia Brown into conversation, highlighting their distinct yet deeply resonant use of foliage and the human form.
Both artists present the body not simply as a subject, but as a site of memory, emotion, and transformation. Through lush greens, symbolic plants, and richly rendered portraits, nature becomes more than background - it becomes language.
Ashley Marie’s ethereal figures drift through darkened woods and dreamlike terrains. Here, foliage envelopes and obscures, turning bodies into extensions of the landscape — haunted, celestial, and contemplative. Her work evokes an internal wilderness, where the emotional and environmental merge.
Alicia Brown’s portraits are firmly rooted - her subjects occupy space with quiet power. Wrapped in detailed patterns, surrounded by verdant life, her figures are grounded in culture, place, and lineage. Foliage in her work holds symbolic weight: it is adornment, protection, and history.
Together, these paintings invite viewers to consider the intimate bond between the human and the earth - a relationship shaped by care, inheritance, and the quiet act of observation.
Here, the garden does not merely grow. It remembers.
Photo: CJ Benninger
Ashley Marie is a multidisciplinary artist in the Metro Detroit area. She attended one semester at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2011 for foundation courses and has been self taught since. In addition to exhibiting work throughout Detroit, Ashley’s work also appeared in the 55th Venice Biennale. Her work is derived from her life experiences. She hopes to inspire her audience thoughts on spirituality. She works in a variety of mediums such as oil paint, graphite, resin, and clay. These mediums allow her to achieve a simultaneously realistic and ethereal look, portraying the illusion between life and spirit.
Through my life experiences on navigating through grief and existentialism, my work explores the space between physical and spiritual realms. I work with a variety of mediums to allow for the creation of both realistic and ethereal qualities to portray this space between. I seek to inspire that we are eternal spiritual beings living a human experience.
Alicia Brown (b. 1981, St Ann, Jamaica) attended the Edna Manley College of the Visual Performing Arts, Kingston, Jamaica, and received a diploma in Art Education in 2003 and a BFA in Painting in 2009. Brown received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2014 and was awarded a residency scholarship in Leipzig Germany from the school.
Alicia was one of the winners of the Dawn Scott Memorial Award in the Jamaica Biennial 2017. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and LCU Foundation Grants. She has participated in numerous group shows in Jamaica, USA and Europe.
She has had solo shows at Studio 174 in Kingston, Jamaica and Virago Gallery, Seattle Washington. Her work has been featured in “Hyperallergic,” “Painting the Figure Now 2019,” “The Jamaican Gleaner” and “Observer,” “Caribbean Quarterly Journal” and other publications. Her work is in the collections of Steven Alan Bennett, Imago Mundi, George N’Namdi, and Brenda Thompson among others.
Alicia Brown uses traditional and contemporary painting techniques and iconographic references to examine race, cultural identity, adaptation, beauty and social status.