About Abby Nash
Holding a Bachelor of Arts in both Studio Art and Political Science from Southwestern University, Abby Nash’s career is built on the same juxtapositions as her fields of study.
In 2016, she was honored as a national winner of the Kennedy Center’s VSA Emerging Young Artists Program. This national juried exhibition seeks artwork that demonstrates the excellence and important perspectives of young artists with disabilities. As a winner, Abby’s painting, Clean Break, was featured in a multi-state touring exhibition. The following year, another of Abby’s paintings, Sandía, was featured in the 2017 Texas National Competition & Exhibition.
As a painter, Abby’s works combine multiple subjects (often animal bones and rock formations) into one contained landscape. This merging and questioning of form follows throughout her work in collage and illustration.
Throughout her childhood, Abby was a regular consumer of media and magazines targeted at young girls and teens, such as Seventeen and Vogue. As an adult, she now recognizes that the messages and imagery she saw in this media impacted her perception of herself and the society she was a part of.
In her collage work, Abby utilizes these same magazine pages— as well as mail, advertisements, brochures, books, and other ephemera — to explore questions surrounding identity, society, and the nuanced messages propagated by the media we consume everyday, particularly those messages targeting women and girls.
Her professional expertise in marketing and design further informs her collage works, focusing on page and copy design to interrogate the ways media communicates and influences.
As Abby's art practice evolved, she expanded into digital art making. As more of our media is forced to move to a digital-only format, embracing digital collage enables Abby to continue to dissect and recontextualize the relentless stream of marketing collateral we encounter on a daily basis.
Abby also explores contemporary fashion and form in her digital illustrations. As fashion has been a life-long fascination for her, fashion illustration provides at outlet for her to explore contemporary design, experimenting with the effects of pattern, color scheme, and background variations on the overall interpretation of a composition.