Naomi Lee Baumol will be giving a talk about her exhibition, “Orienting Myself,” on display in the Wagner College Gallery from Tuesday, March 5 until Saturday, April 27.
The gallery is located in the Union Building on the Wagner College campus at 631 Howard Ave., Staten Island.
The Wagner College Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Thursday until 9 p.m.
In her artistic practice, Naomi Lee Baumol explores how she inhabits and makes sense of the world around her. This exhibition draws from two series of her work: “The Windowsill Drawings” and “Make Belief.”
“The Windowsill Drawings” are comprehensive observational depictions of windows in spaces that the artist occupies. By using strong perspective cues in these still-life/cityscape drawings, she foregrounds her own physical presence in the environment and forces the viewer to occupy the same space. The juxtaposition of the foreground’s extreme proximity with the far expanse of background, as well as the use of multiple viewpoints, evoke the practice of triangulation, a tool used by both navigators and draftsmen to pinpoint specific locations. In doing so, the artist is both discovering and revealing her true position within the chaos of the objects and the city that envelop her.
In the “Make Belief” series, Baumol moves away from the idea of a strictly physical position and explores how she orients herself in relation to life events. Seemingly random incidents become meaningful when they are organized into a structured narrative. These works consider how certain objects can play a part in that process. These things acquire significance based on any number of factors, for example, who they once belonged to, or how they came into the artist’s life. Once incorporated into the artist’s story, these symbols become anchor points linking together to form a web of meaning onto which she can start to weave a personal mythology. The self-portraits that comprise “Make Belief” depict the artist in the act of constructing her own narrative. There will be two finished pieces from this series on display, along with several supporting observational studies that will give the viewer a glimpse into the artist’s process.
Baumol is an artist from New York City. She was the recipient of the Nessa Cohen grant in 2015 and has participated in several group shows around the city. Visit her website at naomileebaumol.com.