Statement
Tracy von Ahsen’s work moves through the architecture of identity, presence, and choice. Her analog collages take familiar symbols like chairs, curtains, heels, gloves, and domestic spaces and turn them into rooms where the self becomes fluid and sometimes unrecognizable. These images are not still scenes. They feel like interior landscapes where memory, intuition, and desire are trying to shape a new version of the figure inside them.
Von Ahsen works by hand, using the immediacy of cut paper to filter fashion culture, nostalgia, and pop imagery through an intuitive process. Her feminine figures are not faceless in a literal way. They are paused in the moment before they decide who they are. The absence of features opens a question. What happens in the space before someone chooses an identity, and what quiet forces guide that choice.
Her imagery is informed by her own life. New York City’s tension and freedom. Time spent in India and Peru studying spiritual practice. Growing up on Long Island and learning early how to rebuild a sense of self. These experiences give her images a sense of pressure and emotion without showing up directly in the work. The visual language becomes dreamlike, cinematic, and slightly voyeuristic, the way a private moment feels when someone else is watching.
A central question runs through her practice. What part of the life we inherit do we keep, and what part do we cut apart and rebuild into something more honest. The collage process becomes a physical version of that question. It mirrors the way identity is shaped, undone, and shaped again.
Each collage works like a portal. It opens a new reality where transformation is no longer an idea. It is the material itself. Figures hover between choices. Curtains reveal what is waiting behind them. Objects become quiet symbols of resistance or desire. The work holds a moment of change long enough for the viewer to recognize something in themselves.
Bio
Tracy von Ahsen (b. 1981, Long Island, NY) is a New York City–based artist whose work collages presence, memory, and self-reinvention. After earning a photography degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology and living at the iconic Chelsea Hotel, she transitioned from photography to analog collage — cutting, layering, and reimagining symbols of identity, femininity, and spirituality.
Von Ahsen’s work is shaped by personal transformation: her navigation through queer identity, and spiritual awakening. Her studies with monks in India, ceremonies in Peru’s Sacred Valley, and years immersed in New York’s downtown art scene form the undercurrent of her practice.
Fusing pop culture, vintage aesthetics, and mystical storytelling, her pieces channel the surreal textures of city life, while inviting a quieter dialogue about the nature of reality and personal myth making.
She has exhibited work in NYC at Amos Eno Gallery, Van Der Plas Gallery the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Prince Street Project Space. She continues to create from her studio in the East Village.