Exhibiting Artist Interview Ellyn Weiss Rockville, MD August 2023

Speakers: Ellyn Weiss, Visual artist

Ellyn Weiss: My name is Ellen Weiss. I have studios in Washington, DC and Truro, Massachusetts. I split my time and that's where I am now. The show that I, I think most proud of at Artists & Makers was done as a collaboration with Richard Dana. It was called White Hot. It's climate change related and it was about the effects of heat caused bleaching of the coral reefs, which is a phenomenon happening all over the globe because of climate change right now. We created an installation and showed the stages of coral bleaching. I created corals out of wax, and Richard created these beautiful sort of backdrops, graphic designs of the bottom of the sea really. And that's what it was.

Ellyn Weiss: My favorite part was the freedom that Judith gave us to do what we really thought would be most effective. So she gave us a space, she let us create a almost a big black tent, and to do our own lighting, and, you know, never quibbled about really anything that we were doing. And that's extremely unusual in the world of exhibiting and very appreciated.

Ellyn Weiss: I work in a lot of media, two and three dimensions. But the themes that I've been really preoccupied with for probably 15 years at this point are environmental and primarily climate change related. And the piece you see behind you is in progress in my living room because it's too big, too big to do in my studio. It, it is for a show at the American University Museum, the Katzen Center, beginning in January of this coming year, called The Human Flood, which has to do with the waves of migration that have been set into motion by climate change, making big parts of the world uninhabitable for people who were used to farming or ranching and you know, making a living out of it. This is one of 20 or so scrims, transparent, or semi transparent pieces of cloth that will be hung right in the entrance, this very high ceilinged entrance to the space that we have. We have a lot of real estate inside, plus the plus the sculpture garden. This is a collaboration with my good friend and frequent collaborator, Sandra Arkin, and I'm just working cranking out the work to fill that space.