Iterations & Assertions

The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) presents Iterations & Assertions, a solo exhibition of works by Amy Ellingson. The exhibition focuses 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 executes a site-specific mural on the opposite wall of the gallery that extends 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, reflects raw imaginings that, Ellingson says, resemble "artifacts, or debris, liberated from the vertical plane."