Jovi Schnell: “Electric Space Gardeners” at Gregory Lind Gallery SAN FRANCISCO, February 23, 2017, pg. 38

Jovi Schnell: “Electric Space Gardeners” at Gregory Lind Gallery SAN FRANCISCO, February 23, 2017, pg. 38

“Both in terms of scale and subject matter, the paintings in Jovi Schnell’s fourth show at Gregory Lind Gallery exude an optimistic expansiveness. The primary topic considered in these large, exuberantly painted canvases and works on paper is described as a “hybridized botanical world” of imaginary plants, where nature and technology operate hand in glove.” Schnell’s work involves extensive research into subjects that include automatic gardens, parallel plant species, botanical folklore, herbariums, and Goethe’s ideas about the Primordial Plant. “ (Maria Porges)

 
Jovi Schnell, January 2017 Gregory Lind Gallery, SF, California Recommendation by DeWitt Cheng

Jovi Schnell, January 2017 Gregory Lind Gallery, SF, California Recommendation by DeWitt Cheng

“Jovi Schnell’s colorful abstract paintings and collages have been a fixture on the San Francisco art scene for a decade. For "Electric Space Gardeners," the artist has created two small works on paper, four medium-sized canvases, and three large canvases. They suffer no loss of the trademark intensity and playfulness of her previous work, all of it suggesting a synthesis of folk/tribal art archetypes and psychedelia. It's exuberantly comic mysticism.” (DeWitt Cheng)

 
 
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 Selector April 23, 2013 “Fortuna Paper Moon”at Gregory Lind Gallery (April 27–June 1, 2013)
“In paintings such as Honeycomb Hideaway, repeated rolling of dice determined the order of colors and the pattern that comprises the piece (which is no pattern at all). Schnell has invented a language in paint, collage, and sculpture that is whimsical, energetic, and overall, fascinating.” (Laura Kerry)

 

February 10, 2011
"Evolves the Luminous Flora" at Tutubi Plaza “Local artist Jovi Schnell and the San Francisco Arts Commission recently initiated an unexpected art project at Tutubi Plaza in downtown San Francisco. It sits comfortably between a playground and The South of Market Health Clinic, two locations with artistic exterior elements. Schnell's paintings are rich with color and symbolism, and her artwork for the plaza, Evolves the Luminous Flora, follows suit.” (Kristin Farr)

 

January 9-15, 2008
Entwined with the Vine Gregory Lind Gallery
“...Jovi Schnell's works are often likened to folk art: mazes of symbols and characters draw from diverse mythologies and knowledge systems and are executed with simple lines and flat colors. The introduction of three-dimensional wood compositions in her newest series pushes the comparison further... Schnell has consistently gathered and collapsed archetypes and iconography from disparate sources, creating new and unexpected interpretations of age-old stories, and her new venture into three-dimensional sculpture offers more surface area and new possibilities. ” (Amber Whiteside)

 

Mar/Apr 2006
Jovi Schnell’s gouache and stamped collages have a more direct connection to folk art, albeit from a culture imagined by the artist. Part Meso American, part religious, and part pop, her images of totem-like structures, such as from the Tree of Life (Snake)(2005), look like psychedelic versions of Duchamp’s chocolate grinder resituated in the Garden of Eden. (Glen Helfand)

 
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International Vol. XXXVII, No. 235 March–April 2004 Jovi Schnell [image of Going Up included in review]
“They say that if you can remember the ’60s you weren’t really there–an accident of birth for Jovi Schnell....The artist paints fantastical giantesses in a style that incorporates the art deco robot design of False Maria from Lang’s Metropolis, as well as Légers’ machine-age cubism. In keeping with Schnell’s previous diagrammatic depictions of whimsical closed-circuit gadgetry (and inspired by a very groovy muse) these divine robots are plugged in and ‘turned on’ to their surroundings, communing, quite literally with their landscape. Cyborg heart valves seems to sprout into leafy tendrils that twist into flowering pinwheels and bend around like a multi-hosed hooka pipe.” (Melissa Pearl Friedling)

 
 

June 26, 2004 “Schnell’s work is poetic. She created a wall filling wall painting ‘Eyeshot Valley of the Macromicro Maiden’ (2004), a girl with large lips and closed eyes who’s lying in a landscape of flowers and clouds, consisting of tight lines and bright colors. Shapes are repeated, rotated, cut, mirrored and used again: an undulating cloud motif reappears in the countours of the hill against which the young woman is resting. Tiny mirrors in this intense and complex painting add to the work a new dimension: how do you perceive the world? What does the world look like?” (Ilse van Rijn)

 
Goings on about Town,Derek Ellery Gallery, NYCJanuary 26, 2004

Goings on about Town,
Derek Ellery Gallery, NYC
January 26, 2004

“These drawings and paintings are full of happy robots, chemical sunsets, and machines caught in the process of transmogrifying into plants or houses–a sci-fi landscape of organic-mechanical overload which is too universal to really go out of style....”

 

Weekend, Fine Arts & Leisure
Friday, March 29, 2002                
Galactic Pulses (Derek Eller, 526-30 West 26th Street)

“If Jim Nutt, Trevor Winkfield and Dr. Seuss decided to collaborate, they might produce paintings something like Ms. Schnell’s. Though not quite as weirdly individualized as anything by those artists, her trippy, crisply outlined agglomerations of cellular, mechanical, architectural, botanical and sexual forms are well designed and have an appealingly bouncy comic spirit.” (Ken Johnson)
 Jovi Schnell at Derek Eller [image of Coarsed Scoop included in review]

 
Review of Exhibitions, New YorkMarch 2000

Review of Exhibitions, New York
March 2000

-“In her New York solo debut, Arkansas-born Jovi Schnell showed six large abstract paintings in which hard-edge, multicolor shapes are set against stark white backgrounds. Schnell’s quirky graphic style recalls 1950s pop culture and space-age design". -"The tidy arrangement of forms in this and several other paintings implies a narrative yet thwarts explanatory logic.
- "Here and elsewhere Schnell performs a rather dexterous balancing act." (Gerard McCarthy)

 

Weekend, Movies & Performing Arts
Friday, April 3, 1998 Arena Gallery, Brooklyn
Jovi Schnell and Angela Wyman
“In these solo debuts, Ms. Schnell exhibits a large group of impeccable collages, in which paint, paper and thread create semi-abstract systems that suggest circuitry, assembly lines or machine-like diagrams.Each interconnected part is also a
small autonomous image with its own internal logic, space and scale. ”
(Roberta Smith)