“Flynn's artwork is emotionally and psychologically and visually powerful and disturbing. Her paintings/collages feel as if they've been brought to the surface by digging and scraping and piecing together shards of memory. Bright colors draw the eye in innocent curiosity to be confronted with the loss or distortion of innocence. The impulse is to blink in disbelief, turn away, close your eyes, but as soon as you do there appears an imprint on your retinas, your memory. Her artwork is indelible, stigma and the root of stigma. It has power and it is needed and important.”
- Bridget Riversmith, Artist
“Ashley Flynn's free-for-all installation of paintings and drawings and murals . . . flow into each other, art without borders. The painting . . . is free, exuberant and sure of itself. Flynn is one of those artists whose impulse to make marks comes straight out of her fingertips and her soul and touches everything in sight. The images burst at the seams, too explosive to behave inside the usual rectangle and on the single sheet of paper. Flynn clearly has some major emotional obsessions driving her work. Odd families, animals and rapists are part of the circus of life among the humans. The result is X-rated and grotesque, with blow jobs, ejaculations, penetrations, birth, copulation and death. The energetic style has a little of George Grosz, a little DeKooning, just for starters.”
- Libby Rosof, Artist and Critic
We live in these bodies, these frail bones, covered with skin that can be cut open and orifices that can be torn and ripped through. The moment we find that we are born to die, we realize we live in our bodies but do not own them. That reality hits us all in different ways. Those that are abused have no choice but to share their destinies with those that took without asking. The abusers live behind their eyes, beneath their cuts, and on their lips; they are the cracks in everything.
To me, life feeds on life; it is the primal instinct of man as well as nature. I am interested in the cycle of physical and sexual abuse, on stages both domestic and public. I depict a world where everyone is vulnerable, where we consume each other, where you can be afraid or excited by the fear that’s presented. I try to put the viewer in the position as witness of these events, making the relationship so intertwined, that they must bear that we all have these qualities within. In my work I have also explored the cycle of birth and death, although in the end I am most interested in sacrifice, and how someone or something feeds off it for their own needs. I am trying to recreate the scars that these sacrifices leave behind.