Tuesday, November 22, 2011

5 year plan

Since I am about a week away from my BFA show and I am hating art at the moment, my five year plan consists more of taking a break. After I graduate SNC I hope to get a job as some kind of literary review editor. I already have some experience in that area and it was a lot of fun. During or after that I plan to move to one of the Carolinas. I have never been to the east coast and have always planned to move there sometime after I graduation. After I get sick of the east coast and miss my family, roughly five years later, I would move back to the west coast. Hopefully then I will be back in the art-making mode and I will move to San Francisco. There I will attend the University of San Francisco and get my MFA in Creative Writing and will do my other art on the side. 

This may or may not change the week after my BFA show when my brain begins functioning again. 

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Artist statements

I am a hunter and a gatherer, constantly accumulating images produced by the people and cultures around me. Segments of this collection of images then emerge in my paintings. My work shows images that are revealed as fragments in the midst of change, destruction, redefinition, and restoration. The sources they are drawn from are changing and evolving and the paintings are caught in that “still” moment of change. Today as the exchange of information increases on a daily basis, it becomes more difficult to trace the heredity of images. One is seldom afforded the time to begin to understand what one is viewing before the image has moved on and evolved. It is out of this fast paced exchange that I extract elements that resonate with a sense of vital meaning. I seek to use this wide language of visual marks and notations to describe that which humanity has in common, be it humor, mortality, or yearning to understand what is beyond.

My work is based in an eclectic aesthetic. My paintings extract elements from the high and low of visual culture. This culture and crush of images is in constant flux. My paintings hold no single allegiance, but are constantly shifting from one form of representation to another. The paintings function as sources of both inductive and deductive image making processes. In our day-to-day life, one is seldom afforded the time to comprehend what one is viewing under the barrage of images produced by humankind. I try to grasp a single moment, a glance, a small epiphany. The paintings are haptic documents of everything and nothing.

B: Amy Ellingson: http://amyellingson.com/
My work exaggerates the dichotomy between digital rendering processes and traditional
painting methodologies. All of my imagery, whether geometrically intact or abstracted and
chaotic, is comprised of a vocabulary of very simple forms that are digitally manipulated.
The paintings consist of many interrelated layers of repeating geometric forms–straight
lines and arcs, primarily–that I compose on the computer. I replicate these basic elements
into an increasingly complex field that I then render in discreet layers of oil and encaustic
paint. Using ephemeral, computer-generated images exclusively as my source material, I
create paintings that physically assert themselves through the materiality and permanence
of historical painting media. The translation from the virtual to the real is paramount.
 
My interests lie in the practices of formal repetition, variation and mutation within limited
serial networks. The works are created through a series of steps intended to conflate the
systemic and the gestural. Working within a self-reflexive system–borrowing, distorting,
manipulating, copying and pasting, re-contextualizing–I am able to create a personal lan-
guage that is hermetic, yet flexible and mutable. Digital tools enable me to develop a vo-
cabulary of forms that are used, grabbed, reused, and manipulated beyond recognition,
resulting in a signature vernacular of marks that are predetermined via digital processing.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

New poem

I'm taking the hospital and ocean poem out of my show and adding this one instead.


her thighs stick
to the seat
the summer heat
velcro when she
straightens up for you
complimentary smiles 
mask an acute urge
oxygened balloons
behind her teeth
begging for sky
for complimentary introductions


they almost made it
by the way