Ellen Weitkamp - A Requiem for Identity

I find such an intense joy when an artist keys into an experience so familiar it feels like an admission that indeed my existence is somehow incredibly unique and simultaneously completely familiar. I pleasantly discovered Ellen Weitkamp, a fellow alum from my alma mater, on one of my research sessions, and a pervasive secret part of me feels relieved. I often recount moments of my day, of my life, of my past, like very often. I revisit them from different outlooks during my timeline. A moment that once looked one way 20 years later looks different, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but I am aware that the moment made a fractal of me. Weitkamp’s work visualizes this phenomenon, which is phenomenal considering I lacked an awareness that anyone else noticed it too. Any one of her paintings could very well be one of these frequently visited moments, they feel so familiar to me. Specifically “Goodbye” (2022) which depicts a garage door to a very specific house on a late afternoon (as evident in the elongated shadow of the photographer, perhaps us). I react not just to what this garage door looks like but what it feels like and it feels familiar. Specific details such as the shadows on the door, the surrounding foliage of trees, the lighting on the door, the rusted artwork on the wall, the straightforward first person POV create a moment of such specificity that it convinces me of a memory, a past moment I once experienced and will continue to as long as I remember it. Her work embroils me in comfort and sadness simultaneously for that experience I remember so well taught me a fragility in my existence. That moment shall never more exist, that block in my identity on which I stand takes on new meaning as a memory, so valuable and completely extinct. This process makes up much of our lives, an endless string of moments each perishing as it builds our sense of self. Such a strange thing to value something, several somethings, as a foundational part of a person that in its ephemeral nature abandons us. All the more emotional to me in the piece’s title “Goodbye,” I question if it references impermanence or simply the garage door’s epilogue upon occupants leaving the house. Regardless, my relief in the piece’s existence carries me on. Weitkamp captured the moment that others failed to, that I failed to, but brought to my attention an aching need to. Thankfully for us, this moment survived its own death inspiring me to find ways to immortalize other building blocks of my identity.

Ellen Weitkamp - Goodbye, oil paint, cement, printed photographs, molding paste, 2 1/2 x 3 1/2’, 2022