Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present Fortuna Paper Moon, a series of paintings, drawings and sculpture by Jovi Schnell. Schnell’s pop-inspired lexicon of organic and mechanistic hybrids has expanded to include a combination of chance operations and pre-determined restraints. Schnell’s works issue from a longstanding interest in color systems, evolution, cosmology, technology, and our relationship to nature. Most works in the show result from accumulation, stacking, and aggregation. Like specimens lodged in amber, the texts, units, and forms become visual records or models of a memory, finding, or experience.

In paintings such as “Globe-Ish Ghost Data,” “Honeycomb Hideaway,” and “Optimist Club,” Schnell sets in motion a whimsical yet rigorous language. Systematically working left to right, she rolls a twenty-sided dice to call out the number for the premixed colors, which she paints unit by unit, reaching the end of the row. At that point the work is flipped vertically and the process repeated forming labyrinthine grids bursting with multifaceted color.

The input/output mechanism of this idiosyncratic process is in the use of random selections from an ongoing collection of texts captured from her everyday life (which she has coined her “Brain Dump”), informing the shapes and permutations nested throughout the paintings. In some cases a selected phrase calls out the title for a work and prompts her visual response. Collaging her working palette back into the paintings becomes a way of recycling facets of the process, creating a feedback loop.

The resulting patterns hold together disparate fragments and forge both tangential memes and integrated moments. This intersection between the human compulsion to seek meaningful patterns and a randomized game of chance and accident results in a paradox that playfully synthesizes the mandates of order and the dictates of entropy. Ultimately Schnell assigns her positions and conceptual concerns back to the practice of painting. A sense of humor and buoyancy act to temper an anxious expression of complexity throughout the pieces.

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 and Art in Embassies program. 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 lives and works in San Francisco and is an adjunct faculty member at the California College of Arts, and is currently a visiting lecturer at The San Francisco Art Institute. This is the artist’s third show with Gregory Lind Gallery.

• REVIEW: SF Bay Guardian
• PRESS: SF Weekly