Naomi Reis

Region: Northeast

My work explores an architectural world that could be anywhere; in the future, the past, or in a parallel universe made from bits and pieces of here and there. Taking compositional and aesthetic cues from Japanese painting (in particular the graphic flatness or frontal qualities) and Western architectural drawings, I explore these worlds using ink, straight edges, and blades, combined with painting, collage, and software-enabled 3D modeling. Meticulously built up from hundreds of cutouts hand-placed and assembled into compositions, these works reveal glimpses of an alternate reality where rules of gravity and politics do not apply, and the imagination is free to roam.

Somewhere off the beaten path of art history lays the tradition of visionary drawings… drawings that inspire wonder and enable travel to metaphysical spaces (e.g. Piranesi, Bruno Taut, Hugh Ferris, to name a few). I see my task as an artist to record these conceptual spaces gathered from the collective unconscious; the spaces we dream about, the spaces we fear, the spaces that help us anticipate where we might be headed.