Zoe Pettijohn Schade “Shifting Sets”

Kai Matsumiya

[Image: Zoe Pettijohn Schade "Crowd of Crowds: Obedience Scale" (2018) Gouache on paper 60 x 40 in.]

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Kai Matsumiya Gallery presents Zoe Pettijohn Schade’s “Shifting Sets”, the artist’s second solo show at the gallery. The exhibition features two new large paintings that are continuations of the “Crowd” series that was basis for her first solo show at the gallery. Schade’s two new works will be joined by the five large paintings that Pettijohn Schade has made since 2005, most of which have never been shown, and are generously being loaned to the gallery by their private collectors. Each of these seven large paintings is the culmination of the artist working through all the variables in the series of smaller paintings that preceded it: this is the first time they will be assembled as a group.

Schade has spent years studying systems of pattern formation. She began by studying textiles and textile history, and through this study discovered the tradition of gouache paintings for textile patterns. For Schade, this obscure painting tradition has been revelatory for its complex structures, adventurous approach to mixing geometric abstraction and descriptive representations of objects and creatures, and its elaborate vocabulary of marks. Her research led to a Fulbright Research Scholar’s Grant in 2013 to spend 6 months at the Bibliotheque Forney in Paris working with a rare collection of anonymous gouache paintings for textiles from the 1700s. Her analysis of patterns has enabled her to find links between the structure and behavior of cells, networks, and information. Each painting involves an in depth exploration of a family, or set, of structures and images, and takes about a year and a half to complete.

Schade’s mode of working is marked by meticulous craft, reviving such ancient techniques as marbling and gilding. Maximal density is achieved through multi-levels of repeating imagery, with the structure of each layer as considered as the image itself. The disparate strata interact, testing the limits of the system she has created and causing unexpected patterns and associations to emerge. Embedded images hide in plain sight then rise to the eye at their own pace.