Zoe Pettijohn Schade creates heavily detailed, labor-intensive, geometric gouache paintings by repeating imagery. Drawing from her own life, memories, and direct observation, Pettijohn Schade creates complex patterns from everyday images to produce layered and dizzying optical experiences. Pettijohn Schade’s work was included in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s exhibition Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (2019).

Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds is the culmination of two years of work in which Pettijohn Schade meticulously draws from life using mirror devices that generate internally repeated structures and patterns. The foundational layer of the painting is a marbled pattern that the artist creates using traditional techniques, swirling pigment suspended on a liquid surface and laying paper on the liquid to absorb the patterned color. The artist then paints in gouache the shapes and patterns she observes by placing plants, rocks, a feather, and other materials inside a mirrored polyhedron. As the artist describes, “Mirror symmetry differs from other forms of tiling in that the symmetry—the tiles facing each other as they repeat, has an element of self-regard as well as self-replication.” Her approach lends the work an all-over composition in which no single element stands out, but each tile is entirely unique. In this work, she has paid particular attention to moments when long edges align—or bond. Among these precisely rendered shapes, there are blotches that break up the image’s geometric perfection. Reminiscent of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests—during which patients are asked to interpret various inkblots, with their responses being analyzed by the tester to better understand an individual’s subconscious—these shapes interrupt the patterning, inviting viewers to form their own images. Pettijohn Schade outlines the distinct polygons with thin, gilded metallic lines, which create a lattice-like layer that appears and disappears as a viewer moves around the work. Through this series of works, the artist draws upon texts by classical philosophers and theologians, such as Plato and St. Augustine, seeking to explore fundamental questions about the organization of matter and the self.