English artist Sophie Aston is a painter who has questioned the role of painitng by making a powerful foray into the world of collage. By so doing she has brought revelations about the creative process and painting itself. Her collages are composed of clippings from copies of vintage Better Homes and Gardens from the 1950s through the early 1960s. By carefully disrupting the magazine’s occupied domestic interiors with her own flat painted surfaces, Aston directly addresses the tension between abstraction and representation. In transforming these interiors she engages the viewer but quickly thwarts their search for a legible space that makes sense. By so doing she draws our attention toward the discomfort we feel when left adrift in uncertainty. At the same time that she engages the viewer in her paradoxical picture space she says that she is presenting “an odd emptiness and an odd inaccessibility because it asks what painting is supposed to be doing now.”
