Statement on Body of Work

Our urban and geographic environment is in a constant state of transformation. My work explores states of change between order and chaos that relate to the visual experience of environmental shift. Painting and Installation Art are modes of communicating our sensitivity to environmental factors; these practices provide me with a cadence and context through which to express ideas. My installations explore order/chaos theory by invoking abstraction through the juxtaposition of technology, architecture, and nature colliding. Paintings are a meditation on movement, color, permutation, and gesture; boundary coordinates operating between space and color.
 
My paintings explore ideas of Fold, Gesture and Movement. These are approached in two ongoing series; Solid Movement and Folding Gesture. Solid Movement is an investigation into gesture and its ability to encapsulate time and psyche, fuse internal and external, and record conceptual state changes in solidified form. Folding Gesture explores changes in spatial order that appear fractured or fragmented. These states can remain calm or reconfigure coherence in the painting. I am interested in the connection between a fold as it relates to architecture or design and gesture as it relates to aspects of drawing and 20th century painting. This series struggles to define beauty, exploring abstraction as incident and artifact of the process in which paint is applied, exposing interior and exterior spaces that may not coexist. There is a constant struggle between surface and ground; between paint and the boundaries within the painting. This series of work attempts to unify my sculptural endeavors with my interests in painting.
 
Installations built encompass three-dimensional landscapes frozen in the midst of a chaotic event. This “event” is reminiscent of a landscape that has been caught in a fictitious disaster. By incorporating drawing and painting with objects and found materials, this ignites play between the structure of the gallery and the theatrics of the painterly gesture and their united associations. This sense of theater is a formal extension of the shadows cast by gallery lights, the configuration of the wall, ceiling, and the intrinsic architectural nature of the given space.
 
Overall, my work explores space; both physically and psychologically. This refers to “Space” as it is applied to a two dimensional surface, or a three dimensional location.
 



Above image, taken by Rustin McCann, Photographer.

Bio


(b. Cleveland, OH) lives in Kent, OH and works in Kent and Cleveland. She holds an M.F.A. in painting from Kent State University and a B.F.A (2009). in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2002). Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at The Sculpture Center, Cleveland; Sandy Carson Gallery, Denver; and Kent State University, Hinterland, Denver, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Her work was also featured at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Fresh Paint at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati (2017), CAN Triennial in Cleveland 2018 and was the recipiant of a 2017 fellowship residency with the Akron Soul Train. In 2019 Omaitz was awarded an Individual Excellence Award through the Ohio Arts Council. 

Statement on Painting Work 

Painting can be an expansive practice, sensitive yet violent, temporal, contemplative, bold and transformative. As a process it can move both fast and slow, be impatient yet kind, be tense and poetic—all the while performing a crafted cadence of oppositions. In my work layers of paint are exposed so the viewer can see a delicate unraveling of documentation and process. These layers looks gestural, geometric, architectonic and graphic. They are a collection of influences, passages and intersections.
 
Often the work is an investigation into gesture and its ability to encapsulate time and psyche, to fuse internal and external, and to record conceptual state changes in solidified form. My paintings explore ideas of fold, gesture and movement. Color highlights changes in spatial order that appear fractured or fragmented. These states either remain calm or subdued or reconfigure the coherence within a painting. I am interested in the connection between a fold as it relates to architecture or design and gesture as it relates to aspects of drawing and 20th century painting. This series struggles to define beauty, exploring abstraction as incident and artifact, and of the process in which paint is applied, exposing interior and exterior spaces that may or may not coexist.