Laini Nemett

“My work focuses on the architecture of natural and built environments. In some projects I collage forms to fuse times and places in scenes that are believable, yet impossible. In others, I more objectively record the effects of time and climate change, whether an ancient cliff dwelling in the American Southwest or the view out my window in upstate New York. Spending more time than usual at home the past few years, my paintings began to sway between epic natural landforms and the more quotidian world just outside my window. In the latter, I track the changes of hours, seasons, and routines through direct plein-air paintings of my neighborhood. Trees shed their leaves, triple in size with snow, break in wind storms, drop new saplings, and reshape the land. Through representational oil paintings I respond to the landscape’s small and large metamorphoses, and my own place within it”.

Nemett holds an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art and a dual BA from Brown University in Visual Arts and History of Art & Architecture. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Awesome Foundation New York, and the Fulbright Program. She has participated in residencies at Yaddo, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Hambidge Center, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Center for Creative arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Cill Rialaig Arts Center in Ballinskelligs, Ireland, and the Alfred & Trafford Klots International Residency in Léhon, France.

Laini lives and works in Schenectady, New York, where she is Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at Union College.