The Year Room
Looking back on Ash Roberts's solo exhibition
The Year Room—in which each of the twelve, large-scale paintings (of identical dimensions) represents a month in the calendar—reflects how Ash Roberts has metabolized, remembered, and reanimated her lived versions of each month.
For the private view, the artist had a clear vision: champagne and berries. Zehra Ahmed brought it to life with a five-foot berry cake, positioned in the alcove of the gallery's curved central wall. As guests arrived, harpist Shelley Burgon played, her music anchoring the mood of the evening.
During the run of the show, guests moved through the paintings in order— tracing the year from January to December—pausing to find their birth month, and to share what a particular color or motif meant to them personally.
For Roberts, January is not just the vivid green of California's rainy season, but also the snow-bound landscape of her Upstate New York childhood, and every January in between. Each month, then, can be read as a collection of sedimentary layers—an accretion of feeling. And each moves into the next with care: she treats the transitions between canvases as something close to prosodic, understanding them as organic connections rather than mere aesthetic choices.
She also wrote a poem for the exhibition, and assembled a playlist to carry The Year Room forward.
The Year Room, Ash Roberts
I miss the years when the seasons kept their promises, when summer stayed long enough to learn your name, and winter arrived like a letter written in clear blue ink.
Spring used to come chirping, soft green harmonies in the woods, blossoms yellow as second chances. You could feel the thaw in your bones, And looked forward to a firefly sighting, Joy was on the horizon.
Now the colors blur their edges. Autumn forgets to linger, leaves falling before they finish turning gold. I remember when October burned slow and honest, rust and amber teaching us how to let go.
Joni played on the radio back then, voice like an open road, telling me things I wouldn’t understand until now and not knowing that I already was in the circle game. I didn’t know to listen harder. I thought seasons would wait.
Winter once meant stillness, white silence, blue shadows on snow. You learned patience by the fire, learned yourself by staying put. Cold had meaning then. It shaped us, it froze our eyelashes.
I long for that simplicity, not because it was perfect, but because it was clear. Each season had a color, each feeling a place to land, each change was home.
