Legacy DC Gallery is pleased to present Summer Daydream, a sculpture and painting duo exhibition by artists and lovers Anthony Le and Ashley Jaye Williams. The exhibition features work created in the past two years, much of which the couple spent together in their home studio. Le and Williams said til death do us art in 2020 and live in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

A summer daydream is this fantasy of heat, bodies and long days in the sun. Summer feels idyllic and aspirational but rarely escapes disappointment.

Anthony Le’s “Golden Hour” paintings imagine what life could be if we all basked in self-acceptance and self-determination. The figures depicted ask existential questions but don’t have to ask if they’re allowed to exist. These works gravitate around a yellow and red palette and aim to evoke rather than explain. “I’m interested in representation that opens a dialogue about what the figures and I are questioning about the future, rather than a solely autobiographical storytelling,” explains Le. Using images from memories, history, culture and his anxieties, Le creates paintings that are more daydream than reality.

It’s summertime, and humans are wearing less clothing, but women are the only population that gets shamed and degraded publicly because of it. As someone who has been visually identified as “female” her entire life, Ashley Jaye Williams has been subjected and held accountable to the societal standards attached to this physical identity. Her understanding of objectification is almost completely informed by a negative lexicon of life experiences associated with inhabiting a body with the label “female”. Visual attention does not equal respect. Williams explains, “My sculptures create space for me to explore objectification as I inflict it upon non-sentient objects and observe the contrast between visual worship and dehumanization.”