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2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Jenniffer Omaitz
Artist / Educator Painting, Installation, DesignKent Ohio 44240 United StatesHome Ohio United States Home Phone: 216-212-5050 Birthday: July 15, 2022 Website: Artist Website
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) and currently working on a M.A. in Visual Communication Design. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at The Sculpture Center, Cleveland; SPACE 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, CAN Triennial in Cleveland 2018, recipient of a 2017 fellowship residency with the Akron Soul Train, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council grantee for an Individual Excellence Award.
Artist Statement
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.
Painting can be an explosive 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 look gestural, architectonic, and graphic. They are a collection of influences, passages, and intersections.
Often the paintings are 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. 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. The work 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.
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, 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.
In the last 4 years the sculptural work is part of a larger investigation that explores the architecture of stacked structures. Inspired by international architects who started designing to address space constraints, refocusing on how to create a sense of community and reduce the environmental footprint. My investigation pursues these questions, only in theory, by using an ad-hoc assemblage to investigate questions surrounding climate change, and post-modern architecture, modular architecture, and psychological spaces.
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.