Studio Wall, at 12 feet wide the largest piece in Ashley Canty’s mid-career survey exhibition at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, is exactly what its title says: a substantial chunk of Canty’s work space, loaded with countless pieces of wallpaper, extracted from its normal setting and brought into the gallery for the scrutiny of visitors. Sprawling and unruly, it offers some sense of how Canty creates the many other works on display throughout the gallery.
These works are of two main types, both of which fall under the broad category of collage. First, there are abstract, quiltlike works, in which the wallpaper is painstakingly stitched together in geometric, gridded patterns. Second, there are smaller, figurative works, in which the figures are glued onto the surface instead of stitched.
Canty salvages the wallpaper, her main material, from houses being remodeled or torn down. Explaining her method to writer Susie Kalil, Canty said she first was taken with wallpaper when she discovered some hidden behind paneling in a closet in her old house. “I loved thinking about who might have spent the time picking it out and all the plans for it — the beauty they must have wanted … I wanted to replicate that connection — redeem it, transform it.”
Canty was born, raised and educated in Nacogdoches, where she lives and works. She has taken inspiration for her craft from her surgeon grandfather, her tile setter father and her textile artist mother, and from collage artist Mary McCleary, her professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, all of whose techniques had a careful sensitivity that Canty’s art shares.
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Canty has described the experience of being a caregiver to family members as “a learning lesson in appreciation of the temporariness of all things around me.” The layers of her work conjure a feeling of going back, layer by layer, into the deeper past — a mood perhaps easier to come by in East Texas, close to the old South, than it is in the fast-growing sprawl of Dallas-Fort Worth.
Ashley Canty’s 2015 artwork “Mound, Richardson, Lanana” is among the artist’s works on display at Kirk Hopper Fine Art.
Kirk Hopper Fine Art
Although many modern artists have used collage to navigate and interpret the impersonal detritus of mass culture, Canty’s work, with its understated sense of place, is quite different. Her aim is explicitly redemptive, bringing out what is beautiful in materials that seem messy at first, and carefully placing them in order. “Stitching together the pieces of someone else’s home to create something new that will ultimately be displayed in another home,” she has said, “is a beautiful way to honor the past, present and future.”
Using patterns of repetition and variation, the stitched quilt pieces resolve differently from up close and from farther away. When looking at Mound, Richardson, Lanana, for example, a viewer can focus on how it is divided into three equal parts from left to right, or on its alternating light-and-dark grid of diamonds, or on the smallest, 9-by-9 grid of stitched squares. The pieces also allow a viewer’s attention to alternate between studying the printed designs on the wallpaper and imagining how they might have looked originally, and taking in the new patterns that Canty has created with her quilting.
The show’s title work, Heap of Broken Images, built up from a staggering number of polygons, is something of a bridge between the abstract and figurative collages. Although most of the fragments in it show figurative details, the picture overall dissolves into an abstract pattern. As the title suggests, each of the image fragments is subsumed into the overall “heap.”
Ashley Canty’s 2025 artwork “Heap of Broken Images” (detail view) is built up from a staggering number of polygons.
Kirk Hopper Fine Art
The smaller, figurative collages are somewhat easier to grasp at first glance. Some of them make comic puns or juxtapositions. Know Them By Their Fruits, for example, shows people and animals gamboling among fruit trees, and The Bermuda Triangle of Nacogdoches shows planes crashing into the ocean, in front of a plat of the landlocked town. The titles of Gerasene Demoniac and Something Bad Happened hint at something darker lurking amid the fairy-tale motifs.
While the brightly colored wallpaper patterns dominate the foreground of the figurative collages, their backgrounds are dominated by the dark blue and gray of either plat maps or star charts (or, as in Know Them By Their Fruits, a combination of the two), giving them a somber undertone. Even the prettiest and most cheerful landscapes and still lifes, such as Belly Flowers and Sonny Hart’s Garden, use this contrast to create tension. Like the delicate, ambiguous assemblages of Joseph Cornell, they suggest layers of meaning perhaps known to the artist but not to viewers.
Although Canty’s approach has been percolating for some time (the works at Hopper date from as early as 2013), this is her first show in Dallas, as well as her first gallery show outside Nacogdoches. It offers viewers the chance to catch up all at once to a long-maturing body of work, and sets the stage for its future development.
Ashley Canty’s 2024 work “The Bermuda Triangle of Nacogdoches” shows planes crashing into the ocean, in front of a plat of the landlocked town.
Kirk Hopper Fine Art
Details
“Ashley Canty: Heap of Broken Images” continues through Feb. 21 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, 1426 N. Riverfront Blvd., Dallas. Free. Open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. and by appointment. 214-760-9230. kirkhopperfineart.com.
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