EXHIBITIONS: Variegated Radiant Dream Plot
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Variegated Radiant Dream Plot featuring David Dupuis, Chris Duncan and Jovi Schnell
25 January–25 February 2006
Reception: Thursday, 2 February 2006, 5:30-7:30 PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10:30-5:30 PM
Emial: info@gregorylindgallery.com
Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present Variegated Radiant Dream Plot, which features the works of Bay Area artists Chris Duncan and Jovi Schnell, and New York artist David Dupuis. The artists' fantastical realms reflect the symbolic cycles and forces inherent in ostensibly simple elemental life forms, revealing poetic and complex possibilities.
Chris Duncan's laboriously rendered works on paper and intricate string sculptures reflect a preoccupation with process, transformation, and the essential nature of form and structure. Duncan's elegant, ephemeral pieces are strewn with abrupt snatches of movement that emphasize the transient underpinnings of human nature while framing physically unrepeatable gestures — from conical constructions spewing a colorful shower of confetti to a pointillist explosion of geometric shapes — in a landscape that suggests the inertness of mathematical infinity.
Chris Duncan holds a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, and is the co-creator of the art-based zine project Hot and Cold. His recent exhibitions include the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Allston Skirt and Samson Projects, both in Boston; Lump Gallery, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Nakaochia Gallery, Tokyo. Duncan lives and works in Oakland.
In her Tree of Life series, Jovi Schnell's gouache paintings on paper with stamped collage represent whimsical departures from universal symbols. From elementary building blocks, her works fluidly branch and twist into rotational and interlocking geometries integrating her designs of nature, technology, and humanity, as recycling motifs drift from one form into the next — fusing creatures, botanicals, and devices. Schnell's vividly color-coded cyborgs and organic forms truncate in a continual process of forming and re-forming — and through a sense of humor and wonder, divulge a glimpse into their own transcendent nature.
Jovi Schnell's art has been exhibited in various galleries and institutions, including The Derek Eller Gallery in New York; The Stedelijk Bureau Museum in Amsterdam; The Brooklyn Museum; and The Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco. Her work been awarded various fellowships, as well as a Pollock-Krasner grant for painting. Schnell lives and works in San Francisco and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Art.
The work of David Dupuis illustrates a strange terrain oozing with menace and decay, in which elemental forms quiver, ooze, procreate, and undergo constant shifts in persona and function. Dupuis' drawings are biomorphic narrations of orderly worlds in which monochromatic shapes drift languorously over multi-hued wave patterns, and organic forms stand placidly atop swamps of swirly ink. Themes of transcendence and sexuality can also be found in Dupuis' work, in images of ladders that stretch upwards towards vacant skies, or vaguely organic figures slumped in sexual satiation. Aside from recreating the horrid beauty of biological life, Dupuis' pieces are beset with tropes of temptation, pleasure, and death.
David Dupuis has had solo exhibitions at the Derek Eller Gallery, New York; and Schmidt Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His group exhibitions include Waterworks at the Nordic Ackvarelle Museet in Sweden. Dupuis' distinctions include a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as public collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, New York. Dupuis lives and works in New York.