SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Gregory Lind Gallery presents Electric Space Gardeners, Jovi Schnell’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. The assembled works include large-scale canvases and works on paper that present a hybridized botanical world where the codes of nature, humanity, and technology flow freely. Schnell’s imaginative interplay of amorphous flora, botanical shapes, and micro patterns offer speculations from a corpus of research that includes automatic gardens, plant physiology, herbariums, parallel plant species, and botanical folklore.
The work seeks to create a relationship to Goethe’s poetic notion of the Primordial Plant. “It will be possible to go on forever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadow phantoms of vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth.” In an Information Age in which printed organisms are quickly becoming less fiction than fact, Schnell’s imaginative and speculative depictions allow for the proliferation and unfolding of new syntactical organisms.
The three large-scale canvases, The Late Bloomers, Plant Cabaret, and Dataherbmatica, offer a rich diversity of form, texture, and color. Smooth, opulent silver overlays of paint transition into coarse flake minerals and pure natural pigments. These works present plants as protagonists by mapping them onto human characteristics and motivations.
Jovi Schnell’s playful and provocative work asks the viewer to connect their own dots between nature and culture. In an era of environmental anxiety, her bold explorations operate with a desire to biologically enchant the viewer and re-instill wonder, reverence, and curiosity for a subject often rendered as mere still life, backdrop, or human resource.
For Jovi Schnell's reception, Wendy Farina will project four short electric space gardening animations with music composed by the band Electronic Death Registry.
Kal Spelletich and Jovi Schnell are collaborating on a "Bouquet of Mechanical Flowers" delivering libations of nectar to the public.
Jovi Schnell has exhibited in various galleries and institutions, including The Drawing Center, New York; Stedelijk Bureau Museum, Amsterdam; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and The Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco. She began work in the public realm in 2010 and has completed projects for the San Francisco Arts Commission, Art in Embassies program, and City of Tampa, Florida. Schnell has been featured in publications such as Art in America, Art on Paper, Artweek, Flash Art, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Her work has been awarded various fellowships, as well as a Pollock-Krasner Grant for painting. Schnell is currently earning her MFA from UC Berkeley and is based in Los Angeles.
