Ron Laboray

Lives and works in Asheville, NC

Artist statement

My practice examines how images become evidence—how facts, symbols, memories, and cultural fragments accumulate into systems we use to construct reality. I work across painting, drawing, installation, and time-based media, building visual archives from scientific diagrams, popular music, historical imagery, mass media, color systems, and apparently random facts. Removed from their original contexts and placed beside one another, these fragments lose stable meaning and begin to generate new relationships. Much of the work is organized through systems I construct. After I had established my practice as an artist, I also worked in rescue archaeology, an experience that sharpened my interest in time as material and in the logic of strata. I borrow from the Law of Superposition—the principle that successive layers form a record of time—and apply it to cultural information. Images become strata; bands and fields of color become codes, timelines, or measurements. These structures can appear analytical, but the systems are never neutral. What is preserved, classified, obscured, repeated, or erased determines what can be known. Chance and control remain in constant tension. I spray, pour, draw, layer, obscure, and sharpen. Some images remain precise while others blur or become partially inaccessible. I am interested in that instability because memory operates similarly: clarity and distortion coexist. Humor, absurdity, anxiety, nostalgia, and hope enter through collisions between...

Artwork

• A Tattooed Woman is between lady bugs and Aquamen., 2023. marker and enamel on plastic drop cloth
• John Wayne between Soviet UFOs and thirteen Hello Kitties, 2023. marker and auto spray on drop cloth
• “ A diagram of gem cuts, a pack of wolves and the colors of Kurt Cobain guitar.”, 2024. marker and auto enamel on plastic drop cloth
• “The Dance Steps of the Waltz, an Enlightenment Octopus, and the Colors of Bowie’s Lightning Bolt.”, 2025. marker and auto spray on drop cloth
• “The National Flower of Nauru, a Medieval Mermaid and the cover of Dark Side of the Moon.” (with detail at bottom), 2026. Black marker and enamel on plastic drop cloth
• The flowers of the G12, Shirley’s first win and the colors of the Pink Panther, 2024. marker and auto spray on drop cloth
• The first photographed snowflakes, decorated armor, and Sid Barret’s floor, 2024. marker and auto spray on drop cloth
• Topographical view of four occurrences of Kermit floating above colors of the most recent Super Bowl sponsors with a faraway image of the last battle of the American Revolutionary war., 2020. High density urethane CNC routed and painted with airbrushed auto enamel.
• “Topographical view of the oldest icon of Jesus, the first appearance of Marvel’s Thor and the colors of the Minnesota Vikings using the law of temporal clarity. “, 2020. CNC routed high density urethane with airbrushed auto enamel
• Topographical view of the first female doctor, the last pharaoh of Egypt and 9 Hello Kitties using the Law of Temporal Clarity. , 2020. CNC routed high density urethane with airbrushed auto enamel