AMY ELLINGSON

The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) will open a solo exhibition of works by Amy Ellingson, titled Iterations & Assertions, on June 7, 2014. This exhibition will focus on a large-scale diptych painting, a site-specific 40 foot long mural and a three-dimensional sculptural translation of the diptych. Ellingson’s complicated process involves borrowing, distorting, manipulating and re-contextualizing simple, basic forms in order to create a complex field of information. Ellingson states of her work: “My interests lie in the practices of formal repetition, variation and mutation within limited serial networks.” 

Ellingson’s artwork explores the dichotomy between the lightning-fast processes of digital technologies and the time-intensive methods of traditional painting and drawing. Currently, she has begun to experiment with ideas that expand her methodologies, introducing elements and processes that are more unexpected and uncontrolled, resulting in a more fluid process between the digital and traditional.

For this exhibition, the diptych, Variation: Apparent Reflectional Symmetry, Part I & II, sets the tone for a backward/forward, upside-down/inside-out experience of perception. This large-scale oil and encaustic painting spans an immersive 28 feet. Ellingson will execute a site-specific mural on the opposite wall of the gallery that will extend nearly 40 feet. The mural is conceived as a “wireframe” interpretation in subtle tones of grey of the imagery in the painting. Ellingson’s sculptural translation of her paintings, comprised of encaustic castings, reflect raw imaginings that, Ellingson says resemble “artifacts, or debris, liberated from the vertical plane.” 

Based in San Francisco, Amy Ellingson exhibits her work nationally and she is represented in various public and corporate collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Achenbach

Foundation for Graphic Arts and the U.S. Embassies in Tunisia and Algeria. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 2009, she was awarded a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and in 1999 she received an Artadia Grant to Individual Artists. Ellingson received a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College and an MFA from CalArts. She was Associate Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2000–2011. 

Amy Ellingson: Iterations & Assertions is generously supported in part by William and Barbara Hyland, the National Endowment for the Arts and the ICA Director’s Circle.

The ICA gratefully acknowledges support from the Office of Cultural Affairs for the City of San Jose, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Silicon Valley Creates and its many members and donors.

Amy Ellingson: Iterations & Assertions
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA
June 7 – September 13, 2014