Sometimes neglecting household chores can lead to great things. It happened to New York digital artist Elaine Ashburn. Always forgetting to put her recycling out, Ashburn would end up at the Hastings-on-Hudson recycling center on Saturdays. There she found a treasure of quaint objects and furniture: old street lamps, antique velvet couches, or mannequins. Fascinated with this jumble of oddities, she started taking photographs–week after week–and manipulating them in Photoshop, to document the fleeting images that affect our everyday lives. Her collages are like lucid dreams in technicolor. Figures and objects float around in a stupor-like haze, as if appearing from the depth of our subconscious. Amidst flashes of light, eerie dolls, angel statues, and flickering candles, we dive into Ashburn’s spectacular visions, inebriated and almost hallucinated.

Ashburn graduated in Advertising Design from New York City College of Technology and took art classes at FIT and the School of Visual Arts. She participated in the MvVO Ad Art Show at the Oculus, inside the NY World Trade Center, and was a featured artist in the Hudson Independent, a local newspaper, which brought notice to her as a serious artist residing in the Hudson Valley. When not scavenging recycling centers, she works in advertising. Her resume includes companies such as Ogilvy, Grey, KBS+P, Saatchi & Saatchi, and FCB.