About
Statement
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.
Bio
Amy Ellingson is an artist interested in contemporary digital experience and modalities of abstraction. Her work has been exhibited nationally and in Tokyo, Japan, and 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, and the US Embassies in Algeria and Tunisia. 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. Ellingson received a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College and an M.F.A. from CalArts. She 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. Her public commission, Untitled (Large Variation), is permanently on view at the San Francisco International Airport. She recently installed a large-scale mosaic mural at Sam Houston State University in Conroe, Texas, and is currently working on a commission for a new public work for the San Diego International Airport. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Amy Ellingson has lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2018. She is a contributor to Hyperallergic, covering exhibitions in the Santa Fe region.
