David Ellis continues his cross-pollination of urban and rural imagery in an exhibition that includes sculpture, painting, music, performance, video and public art. Orchestrion seeks to mirror, as well as question, the world in which we live using a visual language informed by the artist’s childhood memories of the rural south, the experimental hip-hop culture he grew into in the 80’s, and the crew of international artists he collaborates with called the Barnstormers.

The exhibition will include Bound, a moving truck that Ellis painted improvisationally for five 20-hour days at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Commissioned by the college, this project also generated a “motion painting” video, documenting Ellis’ painting process and its response to the setting in which it was created. The score for this video will be played by Ellis’ kinetic orchestra of sculptural instruments created from recycled industrial materials that play as ensemble in the gallery.

Orchestrion will travel to the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati in January as part of its ongoing contemporary series Gadget: Mechanics and Motion in Contemporary Art.

This is Ellis’ second solo exhibition with Jessica Murray Projects. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. In addition to creating his own singular work, Ellis is founder of the Barnstormers, an artists’ collaborative. Ellis’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Sculpture, Art Papers, Art Asia Pacific and Flash Art. Recently, Ellis’ work has been included at the Museum of Modern Art and Smack Mellon in New York; SECCA and Lump Gallery in North Carolina; The Urbis Museum in Manchester, United Kingdom, as well as the Contemporary Museum, Hawaii. His work Granny is currently on view in the exhibition Greater New York at P.S.1. Ellis lives and works in Brooklyn.