Amy Ellingson

Instagram: amyellingsonartist

Website: http://www.amyellingson.com

Bio: Amy Ellingson’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and in Tokyo, Japan. She received a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College in Claremont, California, and an M.F.A. from CalArts in Valencia, California. She is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and the Artadia Grant to Individual Artists and has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her work is held in various public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crocker Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, US Embassies in Algeria and Tunisia, and the United States Department of State, Washington, DC. Her 2015 public commission, Untitled (Large Variation), is an 1,100 square-foot ceramic mosaic mural, permanently on view at the San Francisco International Airport. She recently installed a large-scale commission for Sam Houston State University in Conroe, Texas, and has been awarded a commission for a new public work for the San Diego International Airport, which will be completed in 2024. 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, Amy Ellingson currently lives and works Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2018. She is a contributor to Hyperallergic, covering exhibitions in the Santa Fe region.

Statement: My work explores the intersection of contemporary digital experience and modalities of abstraction. I am fascinated by fluctuating states of technology and craft, whether established, evolving, or evanescent. I have identified primarily as a painter over the last three decades, and have combined traditional painting methodologies with computer graphic design elements since 1990. Increasingly, I use the data files associated with my painting process—raster and vector files, primarily—to create related, tangential objects, such as bronze and glazed porcelain sculptures, robotic drawings, hand-drawn graphite drawings, and Jacquard tapestries. The various manifestations of the data, in a range of media, suggest the mutable, trickle-down, and omnipresent effects of digital information. The works relay the same basic informational “code” with varying degrees of digital and material mediation. Together, they address the multiplicity of expressive possibilities within a limited system that explores the nature of formal repetition, image, and object-hood. I am interested in the incalculable effects of the rise of digital technology on both artistic production and on the experience of looking at art. My process is a conflation of traditional methodologies and new technologies, of hand-made and digitally produced, of strict protocol and strategic work-arounds, of natural and artificial, and of fast and slow. My work addresses this moment in time, in which we, as a species, are betwixt and between the analog past and a digitally immersive future.