AMY ELLINGSON

“My work exaggerates the dichotomy between the lightning-fast process of digital rendering and the painstaking method of execution through traditional oil and encaustic painting techniques. All of my imagery, whether geometrically intact or abstracted and chaotic, comprises a vocabulary of very simple forms that are digitally manipulated. The paintings consist of many interrelated layers of repeating geometric forms – straight lines and arcs, primarily – that I compose on the computer. I replicate these basic elements into an increasingly complex field that I then render in discreet layers of oil and encaustic paint. Using ephemeral, computer-generated images exclusively as my source material, I create paintings that physically assert themselves through the materiality and permanence of historical painting media. The translation from the ‘virtual’ to the ‘real’ is paramount and my interests lie in the practices of formal repetition, variation and mutation within limited serial networks. The works are created through a series of steps intended to conflate the systemic and the gestural. Working within a self-reflexive system—borrowing, distorting, manipulating, copying and pasting, re-contextualizing—I create a personal language that is hermetic, yet flexible and mutable. Digital tools enable me to develop a vocabulary of forms that are used, grabbed, reused, and manipulated beyond recognition, resulting in a signature vernacular of marks that are predetermined via digital processing.”

• Amy Ellingson

Amy Ellingson received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, and a B.A. from Scripps College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and in Tokyo, Japan and she is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and the Artadia Grant to Individual Artists and has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Recent group exhibitions include “Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture Since 1900” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Unfamiliar Again: Contemporary Women Abstractionists at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University.  Ellingson’s work is held in various public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, and the US Embassies in Algeria and Tunisia. Her public commission, Untitled (large variation), is an 1100 square foot ceramic mosaic mural. It is a permanent installation on view in Terminal 3 at the San Francisco International Airport. Ellingson was Associate Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2000 to 2011 and has served on the Board of Directors at Root Division, a San Francisco nonprofit arts organization, since 2011. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.