Jovi’s nomadic adventures began in the Ozarks in Arkansas and found their way to Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles where she currently lives and works. Her paintings appear both on canvas and as large murals. In 2010 she also began to create site-specific large-scale commissioned works for the public realm. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in ‘92, and MFA with a focus on painting from UC Berkeley in 2017. Additionally, she has completed residencies at the De Ateliers in Amsterdam, NL, Skowhegan School of Art, and the McDowell Colony. In 2002 she received the Pollack-Krasner award for painting. Ms. Schnell’s work has been exhibited in many galleries and institutions including the Stedelijk Bureau Museum in Amsterdam, The Brooklyn Museum and The Berkeley Art Museum. Her work has received reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flash Art, and Art in America.
Some thoughts on recent work - 2018
My recent work explores the process of painting as the cultivation of Space Gardens; wherein pictorial space, virtual space and outer space are intertwined. Variegated mark making forms colorful plots of energy for potential growth within an entropic lattice. My work in public space extends this canvas to explore projects in relation to their context, history and contribution to the public commons. My studio work continues to draw on a poetic and speculative text that I wrote called the ELECTRIC SPACE GARDENERS, which like the visual work is an expression of hybridity, a slippage in protean realms where the codes of nature, humanity, and culture flow freely. In some ways I'm still working through the promise ushered in with cybernetic rainbows and psychedelic Thoreau gardens that I inherited as a child in the Edenic “back to the land” ethos of the 70’s and the waves of it's utopian and dystopic pitfalls. Taken within the current backdrop of anxiety around environmental change, I’m curious about how these narratives are being rebooted in our collective imaginations and our roles in co-creating them. Alongside these reflections, the paintings stem from a personal desire to see what may unexpectedly unfold in the spontaneous process of making them.