Seth Ellison’s latest series marks a departure from the home-town influences of West Virginia. The figurative imagery of his Appalachian upbringing has moved toward a more abstract, pareidolic approach. The artist aims to access the unalloyed source of his creative impulse, employing methods like automatism to bypass conscious control. As art historian Kasper Opstrup notes, “the impetus for automatic drawing is often a type of pareidolia – the tendency of the brain to create a pattern where no pattern exists.”

Using a range of fluid media, Ellison carves bodies and slabs out of the void, wielding paint as both chisel and substance. In his practice, he may press or scrape layers of paint to yield accidental textures, then refine them - akin to Oscar Domínguez’s decalcomania or Max Ernst’s frottage. By deferring to chance, he taps into the unconscious and a more universal or “pure” source of imagery, bypassing the personal symbolism Ellison sought out in previous work.

The artist explores the tension between the solid and nebulous, using negative space as both a compositional anchor and a central mode of making. His work centers on contrasts — hiding and revealing, flatness and depth. From this painterly ether, forms emerge that feel at once ancient and futuristic, synthetic and organic, alien yet familiar, charged with narrative while remaining formal. The structure, colors, and surrounding space work together to engage the viewer’s senses and spatial awareness, teasing a desire for reference yet remaining elusive.

Ellison synthesizes a wide range of influences into a distinct visual language, tracing a lineage throughout many movements in the 20^th century. His process channels the raw energy of Abstract Expressionism — spraying, splattering and pouring paint in the spirit of Pollock or de Kooning. Flat geometric planes and crisp divisions evoke the clarity of 1960s Hard-edge abstraction, while a Minimalist sensibility emerges in the treatment of forms as discrete, sculptural objects that challenge traditional boundaries between painting and space. Bold marks and vivid accents also point toward graffiti and street art, invoking Basquiat’s urgency and Haring’s graphic immediacy.