Naomie Kremer: After Effect
ICA San José
October 3, 2025 – November 2, 2025
October 3, 2025 – November 2, 2025
Presented in conjunction with ICA San José’s Fall Benefit and Art Auction honoring Naomie Kremer, After Effect is an immersive installation that transforms devastation into an arena for reflection.
The work traces back to September 2017, just weeks after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. While many of the city’s homes appeared unscathed, their front lawns revealed another story: haunting mountains of debris – appliances, furniture, clothing, musical instruments – were piled high in quasi-cubist compositions of destruction. Witnessing these deeply unsettling visions, Kremer documented these horrific scenes in hundreds of photographs and videos.
In the studio she wove these images into a 20-minute video of slow, fluid transitions. Choosing one frame of the video she produced a pigment print on canvas, overpainted it in oils, then photographed the finished work and reinserted it into the video. The result conjures a hybrid loop that blurs painting, photography, and moving image into a meditation on resilience, beauty, and catastrophe.
After Effect enters a critical conversation about the aestheticization of destruction. Like Sebastião Salgado or Edward Burtynsky, Kremer asks whether the beauty in ruin numbs us or sharpens our awareness of urgent crises. In the case of Hurricane Harvey, the disaster was not only natural. Climate change intensified the storm. Decades of urban policy that paved over wetlands left Houston without natural drainage, amplifying the damage. Through this lens, Kremer’s work offers a reflection on both the fragility of our environments and the possibility of transformation.
About Naomie Kremer:
Naomie Kremer is a painter, video artist, and stage designer. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. Her work is in many private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the US Embassy, Beijing, China.
Kremer’s imagery, though largely abstract, is based in the real world—incorporating nature, architecture, language, letterforms, and the human figure. Her work draws from a wide range of sources and inspirations, including art history, music, poetry and literature. Her video based set design led her to begin combining painting and video.
Kremer has taught Painting and Drawing at California College of the Arts, San Francisco; The San Francisco Art Institute; California State University, Hayward; and the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art, Brittany, France. She has been a visiting artist and guest lecturer at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Painting, Oxford University; the Syracuse University Painting Program, Florence, Italy; Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota; and Mills College, Oakland.