June 2024 / Flown

In the Back Space /

Flown by Ellen Ziegler

June 06 - 29, 2024
Opening Reception / Thursday, June 06, 5–8pm

Artist Talk / Saturday, June 08, noon

Spring Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

Flight, fleeing, flow, flown: a juxtaposition of natural and accidental occurrence.

1. Over time I have collected over 30 birds’ nests. They belonged to crows, robins, bushtits, perhaps a hawk. Robins, stellar jays, house finches and hummingbirds. All were clearly abandoned — no birds were unhoused.

2. My new acrylic pens had been under pressure traveling for eight hours in the hold of a plane. When I went to use them, the ink exploded out of the tip as soon as it touched the paper. Most of it squirted out of in one puddle, necessitating a change of course...

Materials with unpredictable outcome allow for accident and serendipity as well as an ongoing refinement of technique: chemistry is the emotion of matter.

Flight, fleeing, flow, flown.

ARTIST STATEMENT // BIO

Ellen Ziegler sources the immaterial through the material. Her practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage, and artist’s books. She works with pigments, mirrored glass, tar paper, cyanotype, and draws with an electrode on a copper table.

She was Artist-in-Residence at Amazon in 2023 as well as receiving the Centrum Residency the same year. She was awarded the 2015 Artist Trust Fellowship and the 1987 Rome Fellowship from the Civita Institute. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, London and Sofia.

About her work, she says, "What I’ve learned: risk-taking, mistakes and experimentation are collaborations with the unknown. And boundaries are not useful for innovation."