Fusing Tradition with Digital Innovation
Jo Fish’s current work investigates the intersection of art history and contemporary painting: How does painting look and feels today? What tools can we use to engage with it? Drawing inspiration from the Renaissance, Abstract Expressionism, and the Pop Movement, Fish explores ways to visualize the chronology of thought, often using geometric horizontal lines to suggest the passage of time and the persistence of ideas.
By employing both image - and language-based software, Fish generates “ready-made” brushstrokes that are integrated into her canvases. These textures, ranging from code-like patterns to simulated splatters, fuse traditional painting techniques with contemporary digital tools, producing compositions that hover between the organic and the synthetic.
Trends, Perception, and the Passage of Time
The exhibition title, “The Speed of a Trend”, reflects Fish’s engagement with the rapid circulation of visual ideas in contemporary culture. Her work captures the tension between fleeting aesthetic impulses and enduring structures of thought, offering a meditation on how trends evolve, accelerate, and intersect with individual perception, memory, and historical lineage.
Guided entirely by imagination, Fish’s paintings present internal mental landscapes while reflecting on acts of seeing—her own, others’, and those of the artists who came before her. Viewers are invited into layered, unfolding relationships of perception, where the boundaries between observer and observed continually shift.
About the Artist
Jo Fish was born in 1996 in Michigan, U.S.A., and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019 with a degree in Urban Design. She currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in U.S.A., France, China, Switzerland and Argentina, and she had participated in multiple artist residencies, including R.A.R.O. International Artist Residency, the New York Arts Practicum Program, and the Trestle Artist Residency in New York.
