Crowd of Crowds: Obedience Scale

Zoe Pettijohn Schade's Crowd of Crowds: Obedience Scale reflects her longstanding interest in the relationship between crowds and their individual constituents. Her meticulous rendering of tessellated pictorial motifs-- including silhouettes of soldiers, tombstones, variegated feathers, and photorealistic monkeys-- creates the sensation that the work consists of multiple collaged layers rather than a single flat gouache surface, reflecting Schade's fascination with non-painterly media. Specifically, in making this work, Schade was inspired by a group of eighteenth-century anonymous women textile painters whom she spent six months researching at the Bibliotheque Forney in Paris in 2013. Schade's incorporation of subtle imperfections (as the pattern proceeds downward, small blips become evident) calls to mind self-complicating structures which determine day-to-day human behavior-- for instance, the visual languages of cell biology and social networks. Ultimately, Schade's work explores the idea that these micro and macro level structures may be contiguous, and it joins the Morgan's growing corpus of conceptually-driven work by female contemporary artists.