Art Taaalkssss: Jasmine Gregory

Jasmine Gregory, HBIC 💅🏾, 2020, oil on linen, 160 x 170 cm

For Art Taaalkssss, Jasmine Gregory (born in Washington DC, lives and works in Zurich) discusses Trouble at Casa Amor, her upcoming solo exhibition at Karma International in Zurich, among other things,. The titles comes from Love Island, a 2015 British dating reality TV series, where men and women compete to find love and win money. In her recent painting series, Gregory used provocative mashings of art-historical tropes, where quasi-surrealist figurative narratives reflect upon collapsed divisions between the real and unreal. To tackle concerns around a predominantly white and heteronormative history of painting, and its links to the art market and wealth, she refers to accessible contemporary pop iconography and themes, while using satire and comedy in order to troll dominant models.

Jasmine Gregory is interested in the role of figurative painting today as a way of narrating a manipulated reality that mirrors reality TV, social media, and other contemporary digital platforms. Saturated with various historical and visual references related to the medium, she inverses conventional usages in order to integrate her contemporary perspective. In her works, the brush strokes are visual traces of emotions that traverse her and further give rise to images that resist technical reproducibility through their singularity and materiality. Jasmine Gregory’s work was shown at Les Urbaines in Lausanne and at the Kunsthalle Zürich among others. She has also participated in Reimagining the Museum: Open Letters and a Decolonial Framework, an online roundtable discussion hosted by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.