Ashley Peña
Ebb and Flow
2025 En Foco Fellowship Exhibition
Nov 5 - 28, 2026
Ebb and Flow moves between worlds, histories, and states of being. Set in Ayiti-Kiskeya (Haiti and Dominican Republic), the exhibition explores the entanglements of memory and erasure, belonging, grief and renewal; considering how colonial histories haunt the present, marcating the landscapes through which we move and the lives we carry. These histories– neither distant nor finished– persist and are carried forth by living and the ancestral presences that continue to inhabit our world.
Through image-making, alternative photographic processes, and installation, I approach the image as a site of encounter: a place where violences surface, dissolve, and reappear. Image inversions, double exposures, and images that shift between presence and absence unsettle the boundaries between what is seen and what remains beyond view. My gaze centers the liminal space between what an image might hold but will not fully reveal; making room for ancestral presences, the persistence of memory, and the recognition that the boundaries between the living and the ancestral, the past and the present, and the visible and invisible are more permeable than we might imagine. Informed by Édouard Glissant's concept of the right to opacity, the work negotiates the demand for complete legibility, allowing images to hold multiple truths, possibilities, and states of unknowing. Through this process, the photographs move beyond the confines of the pictorial frame.
Water flows throughout the exhibition as both a site of violence and a source of life. It carries the histories of the transatlantic slave trade, forced passage, and displacement, while also holding possibilities for healing, ceremony, refuge, and renewal. These overlapping histories reveal the entanglement of colonial violence and environmental extraction. The exploitation of Black bodies, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the extraction of land and natural resources continue to shape the intertwined social and ecological crisis of the present and are interconnected through the materiality of the work: Images that fade, metal surfaces, delicate glass installation. The extractive legacies of colonialism and industrial capitalism continue to transform environments, while Black and Indigenous communities disproportionately bear the consequences.
I am drawn to the ways resistance takes form through marronage, concealment, refusal, and ritual. The images tend to the metaphysical. Ancestral presences continue to move through the living, while what has been suppressed or buried may persist in other forms. Ebb and Flow offers these images as reflections and offerings, creating space for contemplation, grief, and catharsis against the backdrop of imperial violence. What disappears is not necessarily gone; what is submerged may continue to live beneath surfaces, awaiting another encounter, another activation/acknowledgment, a form of release.
Ashley Peña (Dominican-American, b. 2000, she/her) works across printmaking, moving and still images, and installation to examine relationships between Africa, the Caribbean and America through her Dominican-American heritage. Her practice is an act of witnessing and reckoning with the brutality of history and legacies as they continue to shape our world. Through research-based image making, the boundaries between the past, present and future merge, allowing time to fold in itself. By blending image with material, Peña seeks to show the layered, multidimensional realities of our histories-both seen and unseen, redacted and remembered.
En Foco, Inc. is a non-profit that supports U.S. based photographers of African, Asian, Latino, Native American, and Pacific Islander heritage. Founded in 1974, En Foco makes their work visible to the art world, yet remains accessible to under-served communities. Through exhibitions, workshops, events, and publications, it provides professional recognition, honoraria, and assistance to photographers as they grow into different stages of their careers.