Ashley McLean
Bio: Ashley McLean is a visual artist and director based in New York City. Working across photography, film, sound, and installation, her practice examines memory, inheritance, and the emotional architecture of place. Her work engages Black diasporic identity and personal geography, often centering landscape and interior space as sites of residue and return.
McLean received her BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts and studied in the Fine Arts program at the Universität der Künste Berlin in 2021. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally, including at the Arles Photo Festival and in the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents group exhibition. In 2023, she received the Creator Labs Photo Fund from Aperture Foundation and Google Pixel. She was most recently featured in Cultured Magazine’s 2025 Young Photographers List.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
'Between Reverie and Memory' is a photographic and video-based project developed during my return to Guyana after twenty-two years. The work considers how memory is carried across generations, particularly through the fragmented recollections of my grandparents, whose relationship to place exists in partial and shifting form.
Rather than foregrounding portraiture, the project turns toward atmosphere, landscape, and interior space—toward the textures and quiet registers where memory accumulates. Working exclusively with natural light, I allow dimness and shadow to enter the frame, preserving the intimacy of each encounter. Many of the images function less as direct representations than as traces: surfaces, gestures, light moving through space.
The photographs are accompanied by video interviews and ambient sound recordings of my grandparents, whose voices operate as an oral compass throughout the work. Across image and sound, the project approaches photography not as evidence, but as echo—an attempt to hold space for what lingers between recollection and terrain.
Ashley McLean
Nothing but to be kept, 2026
Archival pigment print in artist frame
Courtesy of the artist
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Between Reverie and Memory, 2026
Archival pigment print mounted on Dibond
Courtesy of the artist
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Single-channel video with fourchannel
sound; 6 min. 51 sec.
Courtesy of the artist
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Untitled, 2026
Archival pigment print mounted on Dibond
Courtesy of the artist
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Untitled, 2026
Archival pigment print mounted on Dibond
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
Ashley McLean
Ring’in, 2025
Photographs and video projection on steel sheet
Courtesy of the artist