Tracy von Ahsen

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Von Ahsen’s work explores the body as a vessel. A temporary architecture through which memory, identity, desire, and spiritual consciousness move. Working with analog collage, she constructs interior worlds where figures exist within thresholds, suspended between states of becoming. Domestic rooms, nature, frames, curtains and transitional spaces function as psychic environments rather than settings. These spaces hold the tension between the self performed for survival and the deeper self pressing to emerge. The work remains in that unstable middle ground, where identity has begun to loosen but has not yet reorganized. A recurring presence emerges throughout the work, an oversoul, surrounding or pressing against the figure. It appears as a field, a doubling, or a subtle disturbance within void space. This presence functions as a force of internal reorganization, shaping how identity shifts, fractures, or reforms. This visual language emerges from nearly three decades of direct experience & research into consciousness, transformation, and the nature of perception. That inquiry is rooted in time spent studying with monks in India and sitting in ceremony with the master plant, Ayahuasca, in Peru’s Sacred Valley under the guidance of Maestras. It’s a working, embodied understanding of consciousness as fluid, of the self as permeable, of perception as something that can be expanded, destabilized, and reconstructed. Her current research extends into contemporary philosophy...

Artwork