Wisps of time: A conversation with Kat Davis and Ashley Czajkowski

Wisps of time with Kat Davis and Ashley Czajkowski

Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, June 10th, at 7 pm EDT

Join Kinship artist-in residence Megan Driving Hawk in conversation with Kat Davis and Ashley Czajkowski about their recent bodies of work that explore memory, time, and family. 

Kat Davis, a photographer and collage artist, delves into the intersection of past and present through the use of found photos and ephemera. As a modern archivist, Davis' work weaves together fragments of time, creating layered narratives that speak to the fluidity of memory and the way nostalgia both anchors and distorts our sense of self. 

Davis’s most recent body of work, Finding Home, uses the lens of personal and cultural history to create works that honor place, community, and the enduring connections that shape who we are. 

Ashley Czajkowski is an artist, educator, new mother, and curious human animal. These entangled, beloved callings nourish her creative energy. Through an ecofeminist lens, her work explores the tension between the domestic and wildness, and how these spaces tenuously coexist within the environment and, metaphorically, within the inner landscape of the mind and body.

In Czajkowski’s recent photographic series, mama and baby, she creates a scan of every pair of objects her daughter deemed “mama and baby.” At 18 months, humans go through a developmental stage referred to as individuation. At this same age, her own daughter began to identify big and small objects as mama and baby thus inspiring this project. 

Both artists use the medium of photography and incorporate adjacent techniques such as installation, performance, and alternative processes to explore topics of identity and personal stories. 

Kat Davis earned their BFA in Photography from Arizona State University in 2017. Their practice has developed to blend their own photography with archival imagery, exploring how the individual is shaped by the boundaries of the social, historical, and political. Through their practice, Davis assumes the role of a renegade archivist who restitches these boundaries with a contemporary framing.

Davis’s images have been exhibited nationally at New Orleans Photo Alliance (NOPA) Center, Specto Art Space, Vision Gallery, Modified Arts, New City Studio, Mood Room, Rosenthal Gallery, and Northlight Gallery, and published in Lenscratch, Cumulus Photo, Soft Lightning, and OURS Photo Mag, among others.

Ashley Czajkowski’s practice is situated in photography, but incorporates performance, video, installation, and alternative print processes. Driven by personal experience, her research extends to social constructions around femininity, the maternal, mortality, and the psychoanalytical fear of the “female monster.”

Czajkowski achieved her BFA in 2009 from Emporia State University in Kansas, and earned her MFA in 2015 from Arizona State University. Czajkowski’s work has been exhibited and published widely, most recently shown at the Tucson Museum of Art, and the ASU Art Museum. Currently in Mesa, Arizona, Czajkowski is an Assistant Teaching Professor for the Digital Photography online program at ASU where she developed a Death and Photography course with a recurring exhibition she curates titled Memento Mori. As an educator, she also assists with Mortem, a research residency for Ayatana’s Biophillium: Science School for Artists based out of Canada.

Kat Davis, Finding Home

Ashley Czajkowski, mama and baby (Butterfly)

Kat Davis, Finding Home

Ashley Czajkowski, mama and baby (Petals)