Naomi Pitcairn is a retired primate trainer
an American painter and photographer––who you’ve
never heard of.
Raised
under the steeple of a Swedenborgian Cathedral built by ancestral kin
in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, Naomi is the wildest of four children.
After just about enough theological education, she absconded from the
“new church”. It was perhaps this regimented upbringing
that constituted her outward trajectory into artistic expression and
drug dealing.
After graduating from The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-eighties, Naomi left Pennsylvania to attend (school?) in
New York. She holds a BA from New York University and an MFA from
Parsons School of Design.
Naomi––sometimes referring to herself as a “quitter nonpareil”––has worked in a number of artistic modes and mediums. But rather than pedal her paintings around the Chelsea art scene, Naomi raised her sightline and went higher. She became a billboard mechanic, painting jumbo likenesses of Anthony Perkins, Yul Brynner … and various advertisements for cigarettes and liquor. Coming down off the scaffold, Naomi got behind and in front of a 16mm camera to produce, direct and act in a John Waters-escque short film After the Beep, which screened at such film festivals as San Francisco International and Chicago’s Women in the Director’s Chair.
By the dawn of the 21st century, Naomi forsook the celluloid for the digital––doing animation and teaching advanced programming for designers at Parsons and digital.
Exercising her exquisitely morbid sensibilities, Naomi started photographing still life(s) of dead animals. Their serenity, beautiful and yet tragic, is one dichotomy (of many) at play in much of Naomi’s work. And though she has never perused Jacques Derrida’s archive, she’s been doing a little deconstruction of her own. In her photographic series Empty Nests, Naomi alludes to our culture of consumption by deconstructing (dissecting) packaging of mini-environments for plastic homunculi (toys). The packaging, once artificial promises of fancy to credulous children around the world, becomes abstractly arresting and semiotic––like a morpheme that represents the choking hazards of small parts (if swallowed).
Naomi’s
work as a photographer tends toward the erratic,
deviant, cynical, precise, droll, reflective, and singular.
It’s a multiple personality thing. And despite her attempts
to remain obscure, Naomi’s work will be featured online at
Gallery Susan Alexander as of spring 2009.
Naomi
is currently hiding out somewhere in
Californistan.
Her hobbies include: taxidermy, bookmaking, limerick and short story
writing, reading, botanical expeditions to the rainforest, and
Mandarin Chinese.
She can be deemed anything but (para)normal.