Statement on Body of Work
My work explores states of change between order and chaos reflecting the visual experience of the constant fluctuations within our urban and geographic environment. Painting and installation art are modes for communicating my sensitivity to environmental factors—these practices provide me with platforms to explore ideas related to climate change and sustainable building. My installations address these issues by constructing abstractions of natural forces frozen in the midst of chaotic events; juxtaposing architecture and nature colliding while simultaneously presenting ideas for rebuilding. 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 amid 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, and 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; 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 and the 2023 recipient of the Paul and Norma Tikkanen Painting Prize for Abstraction. Omaitz is a part-time faculty member at the Center for Visual Art and College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University.
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.