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.

The sculptural work shown 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. The work began as a series of six drawings and three pedestal pieces and is quickly evolving into complex series. These current sculptures explore more interaction on interior space and the accumulation during the pandemic.

All of my work (painting, sculpture and Installation) explores urban and geographic environments in a constant state of transformation. I contrast states of change, 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.

Jenniffer Omaitz

Jenniffer Omaitz