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paint make meaning together in your practice, and where do they resist one another? Ash Kolodner: I tend to think of titles more like openings, or apertures, than explanations. They’re not there to tell you what the work means (though they sometimes do that), and ideally they don’t shut anything down (thought they also sometimes do that as well). It’s more that the titles shift the emotional tone a little—introducing something like irony, or tenderness, or even a kind of fracture. I think titles can act like a kind of nudge how someone enters the painting without telling them how to read it. Petty in Pink is a good example of that. The painting was never about being ‘pretty’ in a conventional sense—it was more about brightness that has weight, emotion that takes up space. And the title kind of pivots on that—“petty” not as a flaw, but almost as a stance. A small insistence that actually holds. For me, as someone who never really identified with that idea of being “pretty in pink,” it feels a bit like a wink, but also a reclaiming. And more broadly, I think paint and language just do really different things. Language often wants to pin things down, make them stable. Paint doesn’t have to do that—it can hold contradiction, excess, things that don’t fully resolve, and still feel completely articulate. So I’m interested in the title and the painting being in conversation, but not one explaining the other. That tension between them is actually where something interesting happens. ML: You spent years working at the intersection of luxury fashion — Milk Studios during Fashion Week, agency modeling for Miu Miu, editorial work for Elle and Marie Claire to name a few. Do you think that world shaped your eye as a painter in ways you can identify? Ash Kolodner: Yeah, definitely…just maybe not in the most obvious or expected ways. Working in luxury fashion taught me about surface as a concept—how texture, color, proportion, tension all come together to provoke a reaction or create a feeling. There’s a real discipline to that world, and I think I absorbed a lot of that, even when I was still inside it and not necessarily thinking about it critically. What I brought into painting is this sense that surface isn’t superficial at all. Every choice—color, gesture, whether you add something or hold back—carries weight. It affects how something is felt and perceived. At its best, fashion understands that. Painting does too. The difference is that with painting, I get to decide what the surface is doing—what it’s in service of. ML: Returning to Miami with this exhibition, after Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012, feels like a full-circle moment. What does it mean to present this body of work here now? Ash Kolodner: Miami’s actually been part of a few different chapters for me. The first time I showed there was back in 2012—I did this live painting presentation called Art Metamorphosis. It was this monochromatic installation with a mannequin, plywood panels, clothing… a whole environment. Looking back, it feels like I was already circling ideas around transformation, surface, and embodiment—I just didn’t have the same language for it yet. I’ve come back in different ways since then—photographing GAYFACE at Orgullo Miami, spending time at The Betsy for a writing residency, showing