Zoe Pettijohn Schade 
CROWDS

Thursday, March 26th – Saturdady, May 9th 2015

Kai Matsumiya presents Zoe Pettijohn Schade’s solo exhibition “Crowds” at the space and will represent its first pure painting presentation. The verb “crowd” overwhelms and preoccupies, and as a noun, it refers to a large number of things collectively. These works uncover the complex relationships among structural patterning and its disruptions.

The weaving of images that are loaded with associations (monkeys, cotton-candy colored tombstones, feathers, decapitated kings, etc.) creates a dense field of relationships and meanings that are conceptually/historically rich. The images and the structures that organize them explore both the aspirations and the pitfalls of order. Her work is extremely labor intensive, as a painting (16”x22”) requires nearly two months for completion, and is composed of layers of images each of which is invented and executed by hand.

For the past decade the artist has been researching the obscure tradition of French gouache pattern painting for textiles from the 18th and 19th centuries.  This work led to a Fulbright Research Scholars Grant to Paris in 2013, during which she strove to absorb the wild visual invention and genre disrupting approach of these anonymous painters and trained her hand in their language of intricate mark making. As an acknowledgement to her inspiration from this tradition, the show will also include nine paintings from the early 1800s, courtesy of the Design Library in Wappingers Falls, NY, the world’s largest collection of design patterns.

Reflecting on her work, Pettijohn Schade writes: “I try to achieve maximal density of layers in my paintings, both as a reflection of our experience in an image saturated world, and as a model of the structure of the unconscious. The unconscious is a potent reference for me in that it is a space where images and associations accrete and exert a kind of furtive power, like an elemental force that colors meaning.”

Crowds is scheduled to open on March 26th. (7:00-9:30). Please email info@kaimatsumiya.com or call (617) 678 4440 for more details. 

Kai Matsumiya

153 ½ Stanton Street

New York, NY 10002

Wed-Sun 12-6

+1 617 678 4440

www.kaimatsumiya.com

 ​

NOTES FROM THE ARTIST, Zoe Pettijohn Schade

Crowd of Decapitated Kings

The crowds began with a sense of time and power, a sense of waves of effort and force evident in the landscape of Paris. I could see the swelling up and receding of crowds in the creation and destruction of the great structures like the Roman walls, and the medieval defensive walls whose fragments still dot the city. One of the most poignant examples that became an early seed for the series was the façade of Notre Dame. The statues of biblical kings that adorn the face of the cathedral were attacked by the crowds during the French Revolution, and were decapitated. The fallen heads were lost to history until they were found in a dump in the 1970s, and are now on display in the Cluny museum. When I came upon them there, I became mesmerized by their melancholic and zombie-like faces; they seemed to carry within them the whole arc of the force of crowds, the marshaling of strength and effort to build the great edifice and the wild force that tore it down. These Decapitated Kings became a subject of a drawing series from life in the museum, and then one of the first crowds in the crowd series of paintings.

CROWD OF SKULLS

I began to see in the landscape the traces of great tides of people, and the physical layering of these archeological remains, this accretion of one layer on top of the other is a key aspect of my experience of historical time and an analog to the structure of my paintings. Time is also felt as an accretion through death, as many of the crowds are formed by the accumulation of earthly remains. The catacombs of Paris contain an enormous crowd arranged in patterned structures. I recognized in myself the tendency to associate this vast display of death with a memorial to some disaster, but in reality nothing at all happened other than time, and the inevitable and relentless accumulation of dead bodies that accompanies its passing. A grouping of skulls in their pattern structure was also a subject of observational drawing that then became a crowd in the series. 

CROWD OF MONKEYS

Death is also a subtext in the Crowd of Monkeys.  The monkeys originated from observational drawings at the Natural History Museum, and I was very aware of the fact that I was drawing corpses. The monkey’s expressions were very emotive, ranging from contempt to horror, and were likely the last expression they had before they died, and probably one they gave to their killer. The monkeys hold another association that is rooted in a saying told to me by my mother. I was relaying some worry to her, and she responded by saying that situation was like the Hundredth Monkey. I hadn’t heard of the Hundredth Monkey, and she explained the concept as follows: the first monkey tries a task and fails, as does the next, and the next, but eventually the hundredth would succeed. This struck me as a very poignant Crowd: one that contains both the hopeful vision of inevitable community progress and the harsh Darwinian fate for the other 99 monkeys. 

The Crowd of Feathers also contains this tension between an idea of perfect union and the restriction implicit in order. There is a direct reference to medieval angel feathers in the coloration: I was specifically looking at Cimabue and Fra Angelico. The feathers of the angels recall an idea of harmony, of individuals composing a beatified whole. The individual feather I began with was a humble pigeon feather I found in my garden and drew from observation. I became fascinated with two implicit aspects of the feather structure I was building, the transition of humble grey-scale feather to beatified feather, and the martial quality the feathers assumed when arranged in order on their grid, recalling soldiers marching in formation. 

 All the images in the Crowd series are organized on a scalloped grid, the clearest example being the gravestones. This stacking structure is fundamental to all the crowds, and it has implicit properties. The two dominant properties of this structure are that is it extremely rigid and fixed in place, and all the elements in it are equal in visual weight.  It has taken me some time to realize these two qualities also apply to death. The gravestone pattern is similar in this accretion of death as the skulls, but in this image the individuals are more equivalent and interchangeable through the abstract form of the stone.

CROWD OF CROWDS 1

This inflexibility led me to investigate what the weaknesses or vulnerabilities were implicit in this structure as well. Put another way, were there any ways for elements in the system to be exceptional or disobedient without negating the whole structure? I thought of each possibility of noncompliance as a degree of freedom, the most available being absence, as opting out is the most basic form of resistance in any system. All elements in the crowd series play with this axis of presence and absence: it is the one exceptional monkey, or a chink in the armor in the crowd of feathers. There are also degrees of freedom made available by secondary structures in the paintings, for example the feathers can be out of order in their scale from humble to angelic, and the monkeys have been given reign to travel between the layers, rising or sinking in front of or behind the other images.

The psychological and philosophical ramifications of different patterns and the way images are structured have been a fascination of mine for many years. The crowd series has opened a way of investigating these dynamics by charging the elements with some degree of individuality, largely through being recognizable figures. The way these figures are organized becomes akin to a kind of law that governs them. The tension between how much agency these elements have, and how they interact with the structures that govern them are central dynamics to the paintings.