Ali Vaughan
Instagram: @alijetv_
Website: https://alivaughan.com/home.html
Bio: Ali Vaughan is an artist based in Richmond, California. She was born and raised in
Bakersfield, California, and received dual BA degrees in Art Practice (with Honors) and Art
History from Stanford University in 2019. She regularly works between mediums of oil
painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through process-based abstraction, her work examines
notions of place and identity.
Statement: More and more, I like to think of my work as “pictures of places.”
Place is not landscape or geography, city or town, location or coordinates. It is real,
imaginary, both, and neither.
Place is something I arrive at in my paintings. Place is an internal headspace I mine for
memories. Place is an emotional state in time. The body is a place as much as a room or a
landscape is.
My work expands through iterations across different materials, allowing form and gesture to
morph and accumulate new meaning as painting becomes sculpture becomes drawing,
and so on. Iteration casts a line backwards through time, but change is equally inevitable.
Sitting with the uncertainty of change has become the most integral part of my artistic
process. Ultimately, each work must get lost before it can be found. Displacement, in this
case, becomes necessary to finding place.
Places are defined by who sees them, and from where. Vantage point matters. Some of my
pieces are situated in the dark proximity of the underground. Others are aerial, distant,
light, and diffuse. Sometimes the viewer is a bird, soaring over distant places, and
sometimes they are a drill, burrowing into unknowable depths.
As we move through the world, our vantage point changes. Familiar places can become
strange from different angles. We can lose sight of where we come from or where we are
going. Location is a contingent and tectonic process.
We are all constantly finding and losing our place.
