ELLEN WEITKAMP

MARCH 5 -26, 2021

When viewers approach Ellen Weitkamp’s work closely, a comprehensive illusion splinters into a fragmented material reality. As a result, the painting’s fabricated world becomes at once past and present: a memory embodied.

Extracting from her personal photos of daily life, Weitkamp manipulates the documentation of events and how they can be imbued with a new life. What at first glance can appear as a quotidian scene becomes stretched and expanded into a discussion of process. A trompe-l’œil effect is created by combining fabric, paper, photographs, and clay into an oil and acrylic painting. The viewer is lured away from an optical experience through the deliberate inclusion of these spatial and tactile elements. A negotiation of the painted and collaged components happens by emphasizing texture and material, while capitalizing on the structure and familiarity of painting. The use of materials, such as recognizable fabrics, along with inviting perspectives, offers multiple points of entry for the viewer. This allows time to reflect and form their own associations within the work, along with a contemplation of the space we occupy and how we overlap with our surroundings.

Weitkamp’s work focuses on these details of the everyday by portraying ordinary moments and objects in familiar spaces that are exciting not in spite of their mundanity but because of it. These moments consist of her contemplation of the space she inhabits and the desire to capture visually the fleeting emanation she feels from them. Weitkamp is not striving to recreate a scene from nostalgia for the past, but to reproduce the timelessness of the instant. Time is something she strongly values. In her paintings she hopes to redress her own desire to slow down time and create the space to breathe and be present. When Weitkamp looks at her paintings she feels a great sigh of relief in that the moments she felt were going unnoticed by her everyday can now gain a shared appreciation by many.