About the Exhibition

Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding Kansas City. Elevate provides hotel guests with unique access to the work of notable regional artists while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space.

 

Ellen Weitkamp received her BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and is currently living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work focuses on the details of everyday and concentrates on how they can build from a single moment to a broader spectrum of time. Through these mixed media artworks and paintings, she is commenting on ideas of identity and memory. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and of experience, tradition is absorbed into daily practice. Through her work, Weitkamp questions the documentation of events and how they can be represented with a new life.

Benjamin Rosenthal holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BFA in Art (Electronic Time-Based Media) from Carnegie Mellon University. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Expanded Media  in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, where he has been since 2012, and teaches video art, performance art, experimental animation, graduate seminar and interdisciplinary practices. Benjamin’s work examines the strategies of human/technological “performance.”  While he works across a variety of disciplines that include drawing, sculpture, and installation, his primary material interests exist in experimental approaches to animation, multi-channel video installation, and other sensorially intensive work that ask the viewer to participate in an act of fragmentation—which he identifies as a fundamentally queer way of making and experiencing work.