Jo Gamel "Le Jardin des Orangeries Secrètes (The Secret Orangerie Garden)"
Jo Gamel " Le Jardin des Orangeries Secrètes (The Secret Orangerie Garden)" 2025
Painting, Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: 44 x 68 x 1.5 inches
Unique
Signed on Verso
Jo Gamel is a Philadelphia-based painter whose work transforms still life, landscape, altar, and icon into dreamlike theaters of the subconscious. Through saturated color, shifting light, and symbolic objects, she explores memory, desire, intuition, ritual, and psychological transformation. Shells become bodies, gardens become spells, and candles become oracles, allowing familiar forms to assume new identities as portals, talismans, and devotional objects.
Gamel studied fine art at Moore College of Art & Design, graduating with high honors. There, she received the Emerging Leaders in the Arts Scholarship and the Excellence in Painting Award, which fully funded her study of Eastern Baroque art and architecture in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is also an alumna of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. Her honors include the Women in Art Excellence Award from Artio Gallery in London, as well as First Place and Best in Show in the Art Is Cool competition.
Gamel has exhibited internationally at the Louvre in Paris during Paris+ Art Basel, Chelsea Old Town Hall during London Art Week, the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, and twice at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens. Her work has been featured in Create! Magazine, The Untitled Magazine, and Killer Magazine, as well as in a full-color front-page feature in the Salem Sunbeam. Her paintings are held in private collections throughout the United States, Sweden, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia.
Artist Statement
In Égyptienne Bohemia in Christendom, objects drawn from distinct spiritual and cultural traditions gather upon an opulent, imagined altar. An ankh rests across a sacred book beneath a rosary, while a dark crystal sphere reflects a mysterious flame. Together, these objects resist a single fixed meaning. They become talismans of life, death, divination, faith, and the possibility of transformation.
The painting considers the private, often unconventional ways spiritual identities are formed. Egyptian symbolism and Christian devotional imagery coexist within a bohemian interior world, where inherited traditions can be rearranged through intuition, fascination, and personal ritual. The crystal sphere functions as both mirror and portal, drawing the viewer beyond the visible objects and toward the subconscious forces they contain.
Presented on a circular canvas, the altar appears suspended outside ordinary time. Color and light animate its objects until still life becomes a visionary threshold, poised between earthly ornament, sacred ceremony, and inner revelation.