Chopping Wood on the Astral Plane

Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Chopping Wood on the Astral Plane, a solo exhibition of ten new oil and encaustic paintings by Amy Ellingson at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco's Dogpatch District.

Ellingson uses repetition and variation as tools to achieve a pure, autonomous abstraction. All of her imagery, whether geometrically intact or abstracted and chaotic, is comprised of a vocabulary of very simple forms that are digitally manipulated. She replicates these basic elements into an increasingly complex field that is then rendered in discreet layers of oil and encaustic paint. Using ephemeral, computer-generated abstract forms exclusively as her source material, Ellingson creates paintings that physically assert themselves through the heft and permanence of historical painting media. The translation from the digital to the material—a manifestation of elusive data into undeniable physical form and dimension—is paramount.

"My work is an attempt to confront the enormity of contemporary digital experience while asserting the traditional, historic, human activity of painting. The paradox of technology is that it allows for an unprecedented level of self-expression and connectivity while it simultaneously distances us from ourselves and others. The practice of painting is similarly paradoxic; it requires a degree of isolation and self-containment in order to connect—in the present, and also through time—with others. On a reductive level, technology and abstract painting (arguably the most human of all painterly strategies) are particulate: pixels and lines of code are analogous to marks and gestures."