AI + Art = Merged Reality
Amy Ellingson's analog/digital art illuminates the merged experience of living betwixt and between. With her ideas anchored in history, she's able to leap into the unknown.
A few years ago, I attended the Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach. With 148 galleries showing off their edgiest art, I hoped to find some new tech-based work. Though I'm somewhat familiar with the various forms the medium can take, when I came across a display of generative oil paintings, I wasn't sure what I was seeing. Was this work digital or analog? Turns out it was both. Fortunately, the artist was there, and we spoke at length about her unique process and the underlying ideas she's exploring.
Loop/Fragment No 1, oil and encaustic on panel, 2023
Amy Ellingson, the artist, creates abstract computations on a computer and then transforms those image into paintings, robotic drawings, tapestries, mosaics, and 2D to 3D porcelain sculptures. Though her visual vocabulary is condensed, her layered use of tangled lines, shapes, and colors form an endless array of visual puzzles. For me, solving the puzzles by finding order in the chaos and attaching meaning to the recursive graphics was innately satisfying.
To my surprise, when I’d reached the Untitled Art Fair exit, I’d seen only a handful of tech-based pieces. When Art News recently reported this summer’s Art Basel Fair held in Basel, Switzerland, was also short on tech-based work, I was surprised again. Though the tools and methods are still evolving, the movement itself has been around for 70 years.
The article did mentioned though that a newly organized fair called the Digital Art Mile had opened a few blocks from Art Basel. The promoters exhibited digital art and held forums to discuss the ongoing challenges. Apparently, the community is divided over whether digital art should join the mainstream analog art world or keep to itself. That brought Amy Ellingson's work to mind, and I reached out to learn more about her ideas and her latest solo exhibition.
JM - What is it about the digital landscape that motivates your imagination? And how does the chosen medium itself affect your conceptual intentions?
AE - Because I work with imagery that has digital origins, a big part of my process is assessing how forms and images will manifest materially and spatially as physical objects. This requires me to ask, “What is the nature of painting? What is the nature of printmaking, sculpture, tapestry, drawing, etc.?” And “What qualities and advantages—and limitations—does each artistic medium intrinsically possess?”
My interest in and attachment to digital forms is the fact that they are easily and endlessly mutable; we can copy and paste them, scale them, flip them, multiply them, and otherwise alter them very quickly. These alterations inspire me to ask, “How would this image exist as an object once released from the computer screen and translated into physical form?”
My process speaks to the fact that, at this point in time, we are betwixt and between the digital, virtual, and physical worlds. They are all in play simultaneously, which suggests that we’ve arrived at an interesting existential junction. We process a lot of conflicting information; on one hand, we sit at our computers and seamlessly compose images and words, but then—ha!—the printer jams or runs out of ink, and we are jarringly pulled back into physical reality. I love the collision of different sets of rules, problems, sensations, challenges, and experiences that we process every waking moment.
Amy Ellingson at work
JM - How is each medium different, and did one take the lead as you put together your recent solo exhibition, Technosignatures?
AE - I try to make the most of each scenario as I switch from medium to medium. For example, it’s important that the drawings function successfully as drawings within the agreed upon criteria for drawing that has defined the practice over hundreds of years. For most of my life, I’ve primarily made paintings and have labeled myself a painter. This parallels with the idea that painting—capital “P” Painting—is the dominant art historical matrix. It’s the medium that all other mediums are compared to and the one that artists are eternally reacting against. Similarly, when I move from painting to another medium, I am working with the assumption that each object will be seen and understood in relation to the paintings. The paintings always come first, and the other objects are made using the same digital designs as the starting point.
Installation of Topographies, New Mexico Museum of Art
JM - How did audiences react to your “same planet, different worlds” approach?
AE - I like your astronomical reference because I think of my work as a cosmology of related bodies, all within a unified gravitational system. It’s difficult to know how people see the work, especially when we only briefly interact with our audience at the opening reception of an exhibition or on social media. After a show opens, I go back into my studio while the work remains in the gallery. People come in, they look at and consider the work, but I don’t usually know what they think unless they reach out. Some people appreciate the breadth of the work and understand what I am trying to do. But who knows? There might be some who feel I am spreading myself too thin or some who think that the range of media is a marketing decision, which it is not.
JM - Does one medium work the same magic on your audiences as the next?
AE - One interesting thing that I have noticed is that some people don’t see the paintings as the starting point of everything. Instead, they gravitate to the drawings, or the sculpture, or the tapestries. They like what they like, and that’s their prerogative. It’s my job to make the best work I can, regardless of medium, and to create a system of works that relate to each other.
L/ Variation (blue) Artifact, R/ Variation (blue)
JM - Were you surprised, inspired, or disappointed by any of the reactions?
AE - I am pleasantly surprised that there has been such a great response to the robotic drawings. I had no idea what people would think of them. They are a bit quirky and glitchy and imperfect, and I think people enjoy those aspects of the work.
JM - Is the role of technology in your art changing?
AE - Always. In 1990, I began using the computer in the process of making my paintings. At the time, I had a hunch that, somehow, computers could be used to advance the project of abstraction within the realm of painting. I still operate on the assumption that painting is a continuum. We honor the past, and we feel the responsibility to contribute, in some way, all in service to the tradition. When I began using the computer, I had the earliest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator. They were pretty rudimentary back then, but as they advanced and grew in complexity, my use of them grew accordingly. I still use Photoshop and Illustrator, along with a host of 3D modeling programs, a few different programs used in combination to make the robotic drawings, and a bunch of other little apps and plugins to get different effects. I love challenging myself with new technology. Thus far, the technology ultimately results in physical works of art. I’m still bound to the idea that we live in a physical world and find the most meaning in physical objects, sensations, and experiences. However, we might be on the verge of evolving beyond that or at least redefining the idea of reality. I’m very interested to see where VR takes us.
From upper left to lower right: Loop/Fragments 3 - oil and encaustic on panel, Variation Artifacts - cast encaustic, Installation of Artifacts I - III - bronze, The Minerva Chronicles No 1 - ink, robotic drawing
JM - What first inspired you to add technology to your analog process?
AE - I don’t know if this is the case these days, but when I was a student, we were inculcated with the idea that it was our duty and responsibility to contribute, to add to the discourse, to carry the football a little further down the field. For many decades, people have declared that painting is dead and over. My job is to show how alive and relevant painting can be. I understood that computers could possibly open up new strategies for achieving that. Of course, many people now use digital technology as a tool, but for me, it is not only a tool but also an aspect of my subject matter. For centuries, we have relied on paintings to tell stories, to convey emotions, to commemorate history, to assert our individuality as well as our collective human values, to define systems of meaning and beauty, and so much more. As of just a few decades ago, our experience of the world has shifted to bits, bytes, apps, and big chunks of life relegated to staring at flat, illuminated screens. This is an incredibly rich and fraught moment, and I believe that the intersection of these two ways of being in the world will create new opportunities for human expression. On a personal level, I feel that it has allowed me to make paintings and related works that would not have been possible without the presence of computer technology.
Large Untitled Variation, ceramic mosaic San Fran International Airport
JM - At this point, has your role as an artist grown to include the role of tech ambassador?
AE - I love this question! In the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of people in the art world were wary of technology and its potentially negative effects upon artistic skill, technique, and expression. So, the question is: how can we more effectively use technology to enhance our humanity and our creative expression rather than detract from it? In some ways, I suppose that I am a bit of a tech ambassador because I truly believe that this is possible. At this point, after over thirty years of using computer technology to make my work, I really cannot imagine making work in any other way. Technology helps me contribute to the longstanding, historic tradition of making paintings, and it also assists me in being my most human, idiosyncratic, expressive self.
To see Amy’s Technosignatures catalog and learn more about her art and ideas, or join her mailing list, go to: AmyEllingson.com
She is represented by the RobischonGallery.com
and the Eli Ridgway Gallery
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