As much as possible, Ashbaugh has avoided being labeled or categorized by various contemporary "isms": Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, Popism, op art or Color Field Painting.

[2] Ashbaugh cites Gibson and fellow cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling as key influences, as well as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

He began working on a series entitled "The Ovals" (a reference to Larry Poons): Large fiberglass paintings using an elliptical format and drums of polyester resin.

For inspiration, Ashbaugh turned to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the beginning of abstract, non-objective painting with Malevich, Tatlin, and Lissitzky who themselves were abandoned by the state.

[7] Ashbaugh decided to make work in the warmer months in Laguna Beach, California, where he leased an unfinished indoor-outdoor building with 50-foot ceilings, without doors or windows.

While completing the installation, Ashbaugh became aware of the earthworks that were championed by Virginia Dwan, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria and that were being created in the Nevada desert.

Ashbaugh thought of them as anthropomorphized planar geometry or as alien landing strips and imagined them placed on a wall vertically, not flat on the ground as in the earthworks in Nazca and Nevada.

Founder Alanna Heiss at PS1 Project Room in Brooklyn, now the Museum of Modern Art, curated the construction and installation of the work influenced by the Peru trip.

Since 1974, Ashbaugh has focused on First Amendment rights with concern for the degradation of journalistic news into a propaganda tool or a pop culture sales hook.

In 1979, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquired a 108”x108" inch painting from the series titled "New Yorker Faces Iran Spy Trial".

When told of the image's placement Ashbaugh requested that the centerfold become a scratch and sniff that smelled of the models' perfume, a tribute to old porn magazines, a proposal that was of course rejected.

As Barbara Rose stated, "Like Pollock, Ashbaugh is keenly aware that innovations in technology require a thoughtful response from artists who are awake to their own time".

[14] He began working on the large-scale, colorful Clone Series, conceptually based on the idea that entirety of art history could be placed on a single floppy disk.

Reminded of Robert Rauschenberg's erasure of the Willem de Kooning drawing, Ashbaugh embarked on painting a series of large black and fluorescent works using the visual images located in the aftermath of a virus attack, or in his words, "a new beginning".

[16] The works were painted with glossy industrial floor enamel and epoxy, appearing as blank television screens with color charts, inserted on either the upper or lower framing edge.

See separate Wikipedia entry: Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) In the early 1990s, there was much discussion in the forensic and scientific communities, as well as in the culture at large, as to what fraction of DNA was required to make an accurate analysis of ancestry, race and origin.

Later at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts, Ashbaugh met Yaniv Erlich an Israeli scientist whose laboratory had just determined that no genetic information is private and can be accessed by anyone.

[21] This series was shown at IVAM in Valencia, Spain, as a part of the major 2007 Ashbaugh retrospective organized by critic Barbara Rose,[22] and at the National Academy of Sciences.