Tracy von Ahsen "Who Is Jessica?"
Tracy von Ahsen "Who Is Jessica?" 2025
Analog collage printed on sheer curtain voile
Dimensions
39 × 36 inches
Limited Edition of 3
Signed on Verso
Tracy von Ahsen (b. 1981, Long Island, NY) is a New York City–based artist whose practice explores presence, memory, and self-reinvention. After earning a degree in photography from the Fashion Institute of Technology and living at the Chelsea Hotel, she transitioned to analog collage, cutting and layering imagery to construct psychological worlds around identity, femininity, and transformation.
Shaped by her engagement with queer identity, altered states, and spiritual inquiry, von Ahsen’s practice draws from studies with monks in India, ceremonies in Peru’s Sacred Valley, and years within New York’s downtown art world. Working primarily with imagery sourced from fashion magazines, she developed a recurring visual language of fragmented bodies, curtains, veils, pearls, gloves, and thresholds. Her collages create cinematic interior worlds where identity remains fluid and continually under construction. She has exhibited at Amos Eno Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Pen + Brush, and continues to work from her studio in the East Village.
Artist Statement:
These works illustrate von Ahsen’s interest in parallel realities, voyeurism, and the idea that identity is not fixed, but something continually discovered, constructed, and co-created. Figures appear obscured, fragmented, or caught between spaces, suggesting moments in which the self is both being observed and becoming.
Drawing on dream logic, the works explore the role altered states of consciousness play in shaping the waking reality we tend to consider more “real.” Interiors shift, bodies dissolve into their surroundings, and familiar spaces become psychologically unstable. The viewer is placed somewhere between witness and participant, as though entering a private moment or reality already in progress.
Von Ahsen challenges the distinction between the imagined and the real, proposing instead that we are active participants in the construction of our own experience. Through creative imagination, perception, and the identities we repeatedly choose to inhabit, reality itself becomes something fluid, continually being made and remade.