Ashley Hefnawy, 2022, detail of watercolor painting
Ashley Hefnawy
Artist-in-Residence
January 2022
Ashley Hefnawy is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who resides in Brooklyn, NY. Their work spans across music, creative writing, sound art, painting, and community events organizing. For their work as a writer, they go by Ashley, and for all other creative work, they go by Myyuh. They are the co-founder of Haza Party and Haza.fm, a dance party and radio show (monthly on Radio Flouka) dedicated to showcasing talents from Africa and Southwest Asia (and their diasporas), and a resident DJ with Reprieve Party, a sober dance party. As a DJ and sound artist, some of Myyuh's work has appeared on: Vans Channel 66, Afropunk, Google, Radio Flouka, Joia Magazine, Wonderful Radio, and Newtown Radio. As a writer, Ashley’s work has appeared in publications like: The Creative Independent, Catapult, Food52, Beekman 1802, Audible, Epicurious, POCIT, Shine, and others. Ashley is also the author of big habibi energy, a newsletter that creatively explores meditations on the metaphyiscal (or Malakut, as known in Islam) and healing, through creative essays, prose, and fiction. From 2020 until present, she has sent out over 50 watercolor paintings to people around the world, as a way of sharing some joy through color and poetry.
Artist Statement & Residency Projects
As an artist, I strive to create space for my spirit in all my work. There is an ongoing struggle between my spirit, ego, and intellect, which is often exacerbated by the need to survive in a capitalist society. All the spaces I carve out for myself as an artist—and space is integral to my craft, both metaphorically and physically, especially in my work with different communities—attempt to honor my spirit's truth. That can look different depending on the type of work I'm creating. Sometimes it means creating hundreds of watercolors to mail out to people across the world, for no reason besides supporting the post office and offering people a little dose of visual and poetic joy. Sometimes it looks like a DJ set at a sober dance party that moves me to tears, especially when the connection between the music and the people feels pure and uninterrupted. Other times it can be a newsletter that explores the relationship between my mind and different parts of my body, or simply an exploration of what it means to even have a physical body. I hope that anyone who witnesses me exploring these different modes of art and creating space for my truth, also feels encouraged to live in a way that feels more aligned to their truth, however that may look.
I'm currently exploring what it looks like to share my brain and spirit's activity through watercolor paintings. I use extremely vibrant colors in my paintings, and imagine my creations as handmade MRI brain scans, where the scan is just my hand attempting to bring to life whatever activity is going on in my mind. The series of paintings I hope to create while at Plexus Projects, will capture the moods and energies of my days, and ideally, give a sense of the state of my spirit. Though I use bright colors in all of my paintings, there are definitely themes that I gravitate towards. Colors often bleed into one another, and the use of white space is often intentional, to show the disconnect between what I can and cannot see with my eyes. What I see outwardly, ends up influencing the ways my mind and spirit feel, and that translates to feelings, thoughts, behaviors. I suppose these paintings will be an attempt to paint what happens inwardly.
