DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION | GROUP SHOW: AMY ELLINGSON

Amy Ellingson
Variation (yellow, with emblem), 2011
oil and encaustic on panel
40 x 40 inches
  

Driven to Abstraction

 Featuring work by

Andrea Belag

Lisa Corinne Davis

Amy Ellingson

Catherine Howe

Rebecca Smith

Dannielle Tegeder

Canan Tolon

Carrie Yamaoka

June 9 – July 23, 2011

Opening reception: Thursday, June 9, 6 – 8 PM

AMY ELLINGSON

STATEMENT

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, is comprised of 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. 

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 am able to 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

Bio