Naomi McCavitt is an artist who was born in Richmond, Virginia. She has lived in many different places including Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Phoenix. She began making artwork at an early age. Her work pulls from historical prints and paintings, re-contextualized and mashed up. She’s using resources from the past for their aesthetic value. By rearranging these resources, she’s able to tell new stories where nature resists cataloging by clumping together in orgiastic defiance, where new species of plants emerge as a god-tree hybrid, where colonizers and conquerors are dwarfed by hot wilderness, where aristocrats levitate from their thoroughbreds. Each of her composition is an alchemic spell, a secret wish to rewrite the stories of blood and domination of human history.
She revels in the naïve, the ridiculous, and the wild, allowing them freely in her work - nature becomes the protagonist. Naomi compulsively creates art during her spare time. She believes that every place one lives in has an effect on their art, and says that that the South and Richmond have always been important to her and her art. “Art is an act of observing and processing whatever is around you even if what you are making looks nothing like the things you observed,” she says. History painting and research into American history serves as a jumping off place for her collages, paintings, and whatever else she feels like making. Sometimes she just wants the viewer to notice something new about an object that is so familiar as to be made assumptions about or overlooked.
