Meet Steve Ashby, PCA Member Artist
Steve Ashby
Genre/Medium: videotape, audiotape, film, Morris chair
Where are you from? “Charlottesville, Open City.” What kept you from leaving Charlottesville? Friends, family, dead ancestors, and, of course, the Morris dancing. I stay to point out things you can’t see anymore, like my dad’s old neighborhood, Park Place. Google Map it and, then, check the aerial photos. Or the part of Maple Street that used to wend up behind the original Martha Jefferson Hospital to High Street. Or Jackson Street, which has vanished altogether….
What are your favorite things to do around Charlottesville? The Mrs. (PCA member and wonderful landscape painter Julia Kindred) and I like to eat out far more often than we can afford. Alas! We have so many good restaurants. Occasional drinking—at Rapture—with the Albemarle Morris Men (I used to dance with the lads every December, during Border Morris season). Viewing unusual movies at home and at Vinegar Hill and Newcomb Hall Theatres. Making fun of my hometown—it’s every native’s prerogative. Julia and I are also fond of walking Meg-the-pooch along the banks of the Mighty Rivanna.
What inspires your creativity? A certain “World Class” city. Movies. Odd memoirs and other books. My own memories, dreamily distorted by time: for example, a new film about William S. Burroughs is out. I haven’t seen it. BUT— go have a drink at the C&O and look above the bar—Burroughs’ face will look back; Go to Daedalus and find an old copy of Christian Gehman’s Charlottesville-laced Beloved Gravely, partially written using Burroughs’ cut up method (see if you can spot Julia or Bizzy Breeden); Inquire about former C&O dishwasher Joe Maynard, AKA Burroughs’ bibliographer and the source of the C&O bar photo. Add a few fake interviews. Now make finger paint out of all that and smear it around in a non-linear editing system. The ideas are out there, all over town, and they need to be assembled into something new and a bit crazy. So, I’ve been outlining a mocumentary for a couple of weeks, now—since I heard about the Burroughs film.
What do you love most about what you do? Entropy, the “hearse of all night,” to borrow from G.M. Hopkins—I love snatching things up, just before they dissociate and fall, piece by tiny piece, into the great Chaos that awaits us all. I get to put them back together, supply them a temporary, if disjointed, reprieve. Good, clean fun—AND—it keeps me off the streets.
What are your favorite ways to stay connected with the arts community in Charlottesville? PCA’s famous Art Drinks. Where else can you find out how long it takes James Ford to put a film back into its shipping cans? Or that a well-known PCA member once starred in the 1970’s Sci-Fi thriller The Cockroach that Ate Charlottesville? Or that the PCA president’s husband has an intermittent windshield wiper fetish? Or that Steve Ashby knew Bob Monroe as a television producer, and not an out-of-the-body travel agent. By-the-way, I think a séance at the grave of Paul Goodloe McIntire is long overdue. Anyone want to join me around midnight at Maplewood Cemetery?
