Ambrose draws her exhibition title THEY LOOKED AT US LIKE VIOLET from Dionne Brand’s “Verso 55.” In this poem, Brand describes her arrival to  the door of no return , one of the last doorways enslaved Africans walked through before entering American slavery. Brand writes:  “We were pilgrims. This is the holiest we ever were. Our gods were in the holding cells [...] They stood when we entered, happy to see us [...]You are still alive, they said. Yes, we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas, they drank us [...] How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune.”

With familial roots in Florida, Ambrose presents her first solo exhibition as an invitation, a meeting place, a holy place, a place of pilgrimage for each of us to witness our own becoming. With each piece, Ambrose creates an opening for our ancestors to look at us and for us to look back at them. Ambrose wields the sensory and spiritual elements of textile to create works filled with deep color and allegorical imagery.

As suggested within the poetics of the title, Ambrose seeks to release her subjects from the painful burdens of history that have yet to pass, so that we may soak in the color, texture and vibrancy that is the miracle of our aliveness.  “They said, you are still alive. We said,yes, yes, we are still alive.”

Ambrose's works can be described as ethereal environments, with each work delicately constructed from a combination of hand-dyed silks, images printed on velvet, and shadowy silhouettes that illusively appear before the viewer. Ambrose seeks to imagine the body as a layered and symbolic form, to complicate overwhelming narratives of Blackness, the gendered body, migration and more.

The artist’s fascination with violet, as noted in the title, is an homage to her great-great-great grandmother, Viola, and originally served as her entry point to the dyeing and layering processes that were central to creating this body of work.