2011 W2S SERIES
Joshua Parker and Jenniffer Omaitz

Joshua Parker: Humans are the only species on the planet that create trash, one good turn deserves another and the worst part about dying is that you can only do it once - but don’t worry, the water’s still fine here
MAIN GALLERY

Joshua Parker’s work focuses on places and things he would like to encounter. He is pushing against ‘labeled’ art that is by default ‘restrained.’ He rejects this notion, preferring that creativity should be able to develop unencumbered by anything other than the artist’s own musings. By abandoning the limits of rational and logical methods, Parker seeks to create new and fresh works of art. “Art unlike other things can appear to have a complete understanding of the unknown. I like that."

Joshua Parker was born in Cuyahoga Falls in 1979, to a family with a strong artistic background. From an early age he had a compulsion to be an artist, often forgoing other schoolwork in order to create screen-prints, drawings, and clay models. He recently received his BFA in Sculpture from Kent State University where he was twice awarded Best in Show at the Annual Juried Show. He recently finished a two year teaching assistantship in sculpture at Kent State and has plans to go to graduate school in the fall of 2011. Parker, whose work has been shown often in Kent, OH,  has most recently exhibited at SPACES, Cleveland, OH, with Sometimes an Entrance is Actually an Exit, and his individual sculptures were featured twice in the annual juried exhibitions of The Sculpture Center.

Jenniffer Omaitz: Shadow Structures
EUCLID AVENUE GALLERY

Jenniffer Omaitz, an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Akron and Youngstown State University, earned her MFA from Kent State University in 2009 and her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2002.  Omaitz’s large installations of found objects, home building materials, and architectural models imply a shift between topography and natural disasters and tensions between physical landscape and the landscape of the psyche. She employs geometric forms that collide together and expand to examine the relationship between the walls, ceiling and floor that comprise the space. She uses gestural lines and cast shadows to separate structures in a way that resembles an urban sprawl; a simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the perceived space.
Trained as a painter, Omaitz blends practices of painting, drawing, and sculpture in her installations.

Jenniffer Omaitz is a nationally exhibited painter and installation artist who has been exhibiting her work in Cleveland and Denver since 2002.  Her most recent exhibitions include a site-specific installation commissioned for the 2010 Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Colorado. Trained as a painter, Omaitz blends practices of painting, drawing, and sculpture in her installations. Her work confronts ideas of interior and exterior, construction and destruction, physical and psychological landscapes.  Born and raised on Cleveland’s East Side, Omaitz currently lives and works in Kent, Ohio.

See More 2011 Window 2 Sculpture Artists

For more information call 216.229.6527 or go to info@sculpturecenter.org.

The Sculpture Center is a not-for-profit arts institution dedicated to the advancement of the careers of emerging Ohio sculptors and the preservation of Ohio outdoor sculpture as a means to provide support for artists and to effect the enrichment, education, enjoyment, and visual enhancement of the Cleveland community and greater region.

The Sculpture Center receives generous support from The Callahan Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, The John P. Murphy Foundation, the Bernice and David E. Davis Art Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, studioTECHNE|architects, the Leonard Krieger Fund of The Cleveland Foundation, Sculpture Center board members, and many individual donors to Friends of The Sculpture Center. It receives additional generous public funding from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Ohio Arts Council.