Cover Image: Aaron Ashworth in his studio, surrounded by works from Over Exposure, a vivid exploration of nostalgia and the digital age. Photo by Colby Bignell

Over Exposure, by Aaron Ashworth
PS Art Space, Fremantle
December 19 – 21, 2025

Nostalgia is a nuanced feeling unique to each person; to express it visually takes considerable skill. Aaron Ashworth’s debut exhibition Over Exposure, which was on display at PS Art Space in Fremantle from Friday 19 – Sunday 21 December, depicts nostalgia at its most psychedelic and bittersweet in a series of eleven artworks in oil on canvas, documenting the artist’s evolving relationship with social media.

Ashworth has worked in Fremantle/Walyalup for over fourteen years as a tattoo artist. Over Exposure marks his first exhibition as a public artist, allowing him to push the boundaries of his craft and speak to a wider audience. Through this exhibition, Ashworth channels a conversation on life before and after social media, and how using it creates hyperreal, complicated, and ultimately fragmented realities.

Ashworth’s artistic process is reflective of the nature of social media itself, a distinct blend of practical and digital skills. Using a photo editing program, he skews, inverts and edits photos from his personal collection and references these final designs to create his artworks.

The exhibition is curated to follow Ashworth’s experience with social media chronologically, using the paintings on the lefthand wall to represent a time before social media, while the paintings on the right wall signify a longing to return to simpler times before this digital age.  The overhead lighting is red, pensive and dim, with a focused white light on each of the paintings to make them appear as though they are backlit screens.

The first work in this sequence is Old Self (2025), which was created by Ashworth after returning to his hometown. Depicting a collaged combination of his favourite childhood places, Old Self reads like a graphic novel, with the piercing gaze of the protagonist at its centre. Ashworth uses vivid movement in contrasting blues, yellows and browns to conjure the sensation of memory, life literally flashing before his eyes.

Dolphin’s View (2025) is the bookend to this series, a free-flowing interpretation of a dolphin’s perspective of human lives, as a grounding reminder of life outside digitally altered realities. The rainbow palette interspersed with black creates the shape of a dolphin’s waterspout, producing a fun abstraction, which makes you think outside your inner life.

It is an ambitious task to explore such a wide-ranging and multifaceted topic as the effects of social media in a series of only eleven paintings, it requires an extraordinary skill set of the artist.  At times, the consistency of Ashworth’s practical method and colour palette does not permit him to explore the different levels and depths of this idea and introduce more thematic shadows.

Nonetheless, Over Exposure overall is a thoughtful, fun, and accessible conversation starter about the impacts of social media, fit for all generations. I look forward to seeing more of Ashworth’s work as it develops into new and exciting territory.