If I can’t have it, no one can
November 17, 2023–May 5, 2024
Jasmine Gregory, a US artist living in Zurich, is exhibiting solo for the first time in France at the Capc Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in collaboration with the Centre culturel suisse On Tour in Bordeaux.
Jasmine Gregory uses paint as a tool and medium that she repeatedly twists. This exhibition is an opportunity for her to produce a new series of canvases and sculptures. The various areas of the exhibition have been designed as environments in which the artist can develop a derivative account of painting based on a series of visual experiences. In more specific terms, the artist presents a series of commercial paintings and sculptures in which she questions the notion of value and what helps to generate it. Another facet of her art explores the erasure of Black experiences and lives. Based on the work of Afro-pessimist philosopher Calvin L. Warren, the artist addresses issues focusing on existence and being.
When talking of her work, the artist regularly uses the term “abject” which she has borrowed from Julia Kristeva. The abject is what we expel from our bodies (pus, sweat, rot) and which disgusts us. In her work, Jasmine Gregory also seeks to reach the edge of painting, in its abjection: she uses leftovers and waste generated by painting and puts it on display. And so painting bleeds out beyond the frame (of both the canvas and the exhibition), it spreads, disgustingly, spilling out, beyond the confines of its proper place, all the better to question its own ultimate destiny, finitude and death. The artist conceives of her painting in the afterworld. Just as figures in pop culture, such as Lana Del Rey, are objects of fantasy, elevated to icon status, Jasmine Gregory examines what is left of the icon once it has been reduced to a mere carcass. Fully aware of living in times that she feels are the debris of a world that is already dead (the US is no longer an El Dorado, it is the cemetery for the American Dream), she embraces painting in this critical dimension—this art history medium par excellence, celebrated, declared dead and resuscitated countless times. Worn out, manipulated, consigned to patriarchal capitalist history, all that is left, as with the US, is a deadly memory that she twists to the point of exhaustion.
Curators: Claire Hoffmann (CCS) & Marion Vasseur Raluy (Capc)
Information
Opening: November 16 at 7pm (with PRICE’s performance at 8pm)
Open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 11am to 6pm
8 EUR full rate / 4.50 EUR reduced rate / 2 EUR for students
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