Jasmine Gregory, a US artist residing in Zurich, is presenting her first solo exhibition in France on the Capc Musée d’artwork contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with the Centre culturel suisse On Tour in Bordeaux.

Jasmine Gregory makes use of paint as a device and medium that she repeatedly twists. This exhibition is a chance for her to provide a brand new sequence of canvases and sculptures. The assorted areas of the exhibition have been designed as environments during which the artist can develop a spinoff account of portray based mostly on a sequence of visible experiences. In additional particular phrases, the artist presents a sequence of economic work and sculptures during which she questions the notion of worth and what helps to generate it. One other aspect of her artwork explores the erasure of Black experiences and lives. Based mostly on the work of Afro-pessimist thinker Calvin L. Warren, the artist addresses points specializing in existence and being.

A few of Jasmine Gregory’s work are based mostly on photographs already in circulation, particularly art work utilized in promoting (akin to Property Sale No. 1, 2023), which the artist then reworks on the subject of artwork historical past and modern artwork (particularly Jackson Pollock). Persevering with with this “cowl” theme, her installations take form as a set of deserted, worn-out objects (paper cups, shoe bins, packaging, frames with out images, metallic hangers, items from a jigsaw puzzle and so on.) blended with traces of studio work (an artist’s dried out palette or a plastic jerry can crammed with paint). Jasmine Gregory thus provides these objects and pictures a second life, during which the sentimental worth of what we see takes priority over the monetary worth of what we personal.

Jasmine Gregory takes an curiosity in business photos usually, and people focusing on a buyer base preoccupied with the inheritance of their monetary property specifically. Confronting these photographs and slogans with the lengthy custom of portray as an artwork type, the artist faucets into a possible correlation of their intrinsically unique working mode. Clones and copies on the one hand, and layers and residue of studio paint on the opposite, cleave a chasm between the overall lack of depth in these extremely persuasive photographs and actuality submerged by the overaccumulation of fabric items that rot of their obsolescence. Jasmine Gregory’s work takes on a crucial dimension, questioning the place of our bodies, topics and marginal identities inside these techniques. It explores the strain between photographs of client items and property and the way issues are made out there to our gaze with out us having the ability to really acquire entry to them.

When speaking of her work, the artist often makes use of the time period “abject” which she has borrowed from Julia Kristeva.¹ The abject is what we expel from our our bodies (pus, sweat, rot) and which disgusts us. In her work, Jasmine Gregory additionally seeks to achieve the sting of portray, in its abjection: she makes use of leftovers and waste generated by portray and places it on show. And so portray bleeds out past the body (of each the canvas and the exhibition), it spreads, disgustingly, spilling out, past the confines of its correct place, all the higher to query its personal final future, finitude and loss of life. The artist conceives of her portray within the afterworld. Simply as figures in popular culture, akin to Lana Del Rey, are objects of fantasy, elevated to icon standing, Jasmine Gregory examines what’s left of the icon as soon as it has been decreased to a mere carcass.
Absolutely conscious of residing in occasions that she feels are the particles of a world that’s already lifeless (the USA is not an El Dorado, it’s the cemetery for the American Dream), she embraces portray on this crucial dimension—this artwork historical past medium par excellence, celebrated, declared lifeless and resuscitated numerous occasions. Worn out, manipulated, consigned to patriarchal capitalist historical past, all that’s left, as with the USA, is a deathly reminiscence that she twists to the purpose of exhaustion.

However as an alternative of resigning herself to an apparently ineluctable future, Jasmine Gregory speaks the language of collage, a wierd assemblage of references to late capitalism, an finish of artwork, with a purpose to remodel it. Right here, portray is variously deconstructed, dramatised in some exhibition rooms as if to evoke tragedy, or quite the opposite overexposed beneath ultra-white gentle as if below medical examination. The paintwork is showcased; an interaction of sunshine makes it seem and disappear: it stretches throughout partitions to develop into structure. All inviting motion, for an alternate contemplation of portray. Portray that’s initially too empty, then too full, loaded with indicators which are instantly deleted.

Curated by
Claire Hoffmann and Marion Vasseur Raluy

at Capc Musée d’artwork contemporain de Bordeaux
till Could 5, 2024