| Amy EllingsonŐs
paintings are composed like hip-hop songs. Using her computer to recycle
imagery, she samples, reconstitutes and rearranges typography, textile patterns,
architectural embellishment, and advertising into a whole new visual fabric.
The cyclic method of construction mimics the flow of images through culture.
Ellingson paints with pigmented encaustic. This luminous seductive material
becomes dense and plastic-like, moving the medium beyond paint toward "object".
In her new body of work, Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, Ellingson has
begun to "iron out the irony", using less appropriated imagery. Rather,
she is relying on formal elements such as points, lines, and grids, which
she continues to manipulate on the computer, and then translates to large
encaustic paintings. These works do not refer to the cycle of the four seasons
in the usual sense; she approaches the project from the standpoint of how
our perception of time changes as the seasons change. Hence, Even After
a Century of Winter involves complex layers of geometric patterns, One Unbounded
Spring is composed of vertical linear thrust with a punctuating cacophony
of dot patterns, Summertime This Time Removed has flowing rhythmic shapes
truncated and interrupted and Till From Itself it Fell utilizes stretched
and pinched grids and linear forms alluding to gravitational force. Also
showing is a small edition of prints correlating to each of the large paintings.
Ellingson works and lives in San Francisco, CA . |
