Pamela Ellick (Alumnx

pamela ellicK in Conversation with JessiCa BeCkwith

Jessica Beckwith: Light dissolves materiality and seems to act as a vehicle for sentience or consciousness in your works, creating a sense of presence and transparency, which creates a rich multi-dimensional reality. I wanted to ask you about the ways in which transparency and light offer a window into the interiority of place in your work. Do you feel a connection between the interiority of these spaces and the outer world or collective space?

Pamela Ellick: I think I'm in denial about who some of the figures in my work are, because my whole life I've been terrified by the idea of paranormal things, yet I am fascinated by light beings and spiritual bodies. I suppose it is just semantics. I use light and transparency as a means to suggest a spirit of something, be it emotions or physical places and beings, rather than someone specific and fleshy (so yes, dissolving materiality). Embedded into all the glitter, my images often have a psychological narrative based in isolation and the desire for community.

Light and transparency allow me to create an alternate dimension of beings and their environment while still being relatively relatable. Suggesting auras and energy fields through these transparencies and inner-glow environments activates the space, and even ‘lifeless’ environments prove to have energy and aura. The physical, tangible textures of nature versus the invisible ~stuff~ that you might see in an altered state of consciousness (such as meditation or purposeful lucid dreaming) provides a grounding effect that still feels a bit floaty. Concentrating on specific things in my environment such as textures, colors, and the way that transparent things interact with light (i.e., water, glass, smoke, sheer cloth) encourages me to be more aware of my surroundings and more mentally present when possible.

JB: How do you see this informing the way you see the world? You talk about using a combination of digital media and photography in the process of creating your paintings. I’m curious about how that layering influences your work? Is it purely visual or are you drawing from a phenomenological presence within the images that you’re using to inform your paintings?

PE: I use digital media as a means to extend the capabilities of oil paint, such as using manipulated photo references and making videos of layered and collected footage to create moving imagery that communicates the energy I envision. My paintings are detailed snapshots; my videos are intended as virtual manifestations of realities that can only be conceived in dreamlike/altered mental states, as far as I know! I layer images and videos to create a delay and glow affect that reads as less physical and more airy, more illuminated. It helps communicate that there is this ~other~ world somewhere/ somehow that we can’t quite understand all the way.

Pamela Ellick

BFA Painting and Drawing, Alumnx 2020

Are You Leaving 2020. Oil and acrylic, 18 x 24 in. (left)