Jasmine Gregory on colours and a seriousness that fails

Jasmine Gregory is an American artist.

Nils Amadeus Lange (born in Köln) works as a performer, artist and choreographer.

They both live and work in Zürich, Switzerland.

Nils Amadeus Lange: What does color mean to you?

Jasmine Gregory: I think I could talk all day about color. I was always taught that we have to have our own subjective experience to understand how color works, much like Josef Albers mentions in his book Interaction of Color (1963). He also notes that color is relative, and it is dependent on the surrounding light, the color shape and quantity, the other colors, the background, and our flexible way of viewing. I’m also interested in how we use color to identify and how this identification method adjusts our social frame of thinking.

Color is intertwined with gender, race, and social issues. In general, humans are pretty visual and what we see affects how we navigate through our society and space. Why do we choose blue for boys and pink for girls? How do these prescribed color options control the narrative for various gender stereotypes? Red is associated with communism to represent the blood of the workers who died in the struggle against capitalism. Restaurants also use red to decorate their interiors because it’s thought to incite hunger. There are probably more than a hundred shades of red, each labeled with specific Pantone numbers, paint names, and RGB numbers.

Color is how we categorize, label and organize our society.

As a painter, I can't help but take an interest in the materiality of color and its point of specificity of each hue. For instance, Cadmium Red is different from Alizarin Crimson through hue and its physical weight. Cadmium red is also super powerful when you mix it with other colors and can be at times quite overbearing. Color changes depending on its relation and the actual brand of paint. Painters learn to notice these incredibly nerdy details. How can you process the world without understanding the value of color? I frequently play with saturation as a coded way of confronting color. On the flip side, I also think about color as being repulsive in that it appears so candy-sweet that they become sickly and obtain a particular type of plasticity. But it all depends on what the painting is going to be. Lately, I have been interested in the same shade of green that film sets use for green screens to relate to what can be legible and illegible.

I see a lot of references from reality TV, like Real Housewives, on your Instagram.
Does it influence your work?

Yes and no. This show doesn’t require much concentration, making it easy to act as background noise while I paint since my complete focus needs to be on the painting. I am not aiming to make a profound statement about the tv show, nor any reality show. We all know that reality tv is shaped to create a storyline that will make excellent ratings. It's more of a projection of an image. In a way, it's kind of like figurative painting. When we paint an object, it's never obviously the actual object but a representation. This idea relates to Rene Magritte’s “Ceci n'est pas une pipe.” The pipe that Magritte replicates in this work isn’t the actual pipe but rather a drawing of a pipe. Whenever I paint in figuration, I use the motif or subject to enter the painting. It's rarely solely about the actual image or subject that it represents. The main subject is the actual paint and how it physically lays on the canvas. When I use any kind of reality tv as a reference for my paintings, it's usually for an attribute or nuance of something with a level of cringe as well as using it ironically..

Having said that, do plasticity and superficiality appear in your work?

If anything, I am attracted to how moments of superficiality are fabricated throughout the Real Housewives show. The show's superficiality becomes the basis of its general production, the characters, the sound production, the editing, etc. It’s an entrance into their vulnerable lives, which we all know is manipulated by producers who conduct the storyline of each series. There is a distortion of truth and reality. There’s botox, fillers and pretty much every plastic procedure imaginable mentioned on the show to plump, erase, cover-up, and mask all defects giving the illusion that they love nothing more than a perfect, ageless, stress-free life. I like the show because it's not meant to be taken seriously. It's no film from the Criterion Collections for sure.

In my paintings, I love challenging aesthetics and our response to them. It’s pretty much a no-brainer given the long relationship any object in art has with the “ideal” or “beauty.” These conventions alone aren’t important to me. Making a painting that is well packaged for the art market, which follows a level of traditional sophistication, is pretty much the complete opposite of all my intentions. I intend to make paintings that challenge me and, hopefully, everyone else. I see value in things considered cheap and lack “taste.” Mainly, I like to assemble forms, gestures, motifs in compositions which challenge me to think poetically about my conceptual ideas.

Camp is probably one of the biggest points of contact between the two of us. We've often talked about John Waters, the father of camp and trash. Who is from Baltimore just like you.
How exactly is camp reflected in your work?

Camp is cool, and I subscribe. Camp is frequently created by the people who aren’t represented in the mainstream system but then reappropriate the mainstream to the point where they expose the absurdity of mainstream values. I have incorporated these ideas in a lot of my paintings in the past. In Susan Sontag’s text Notes on Camp, she writes, “In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” I over-exaggerate elements of old moments in art history and iconographies to the point where it becomes absurd and almost like a joke. Like if the canons of art history became a drag queen.

Imagine, let's say, a Giorgio Morandi in drag (lol).

My painterly ability and style switch between academicism and amateurism, highly stylized and playful, dark and comedic to create unconventional relationships within the composition that challenge and critique the traditional discourse of painting. I find the switch of style pertaining to my conceptual ideas essential. The style should do nothing but help communicate whatever is on my mind.

Your paintings make me laugh and confront me at the same time with my own reality, they help me to rethink.
What role does humor play for you?

I see humor as healing awkward or unfortunate events or Larry David-esque situations. It is literally the medicine to everything. I think it’s an essential solution to dealing with everyday absurdity. On the other hand, humor has a way of also telling the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts. I often wonder if my humor translates in Europe in general or how it comes off? Does humor become cringe overtime? Humor is a challenge to translate through culture as many references get lost.

The subject matter in your paintings includes dogs with gel nails, dogs posing flirtatiously or coy, clowns, a still life of fruits shaped like butts in combination with a hemorrhoid scraper. Your motifs are iconic in the truest sense. They are unforgettable. They form a universe of symbols, codes, iconographies, and criticism. How do you come up with your compositions?

When placed in the same composition, the relationships of these iconographies can create a different meaning. They are also used as an entry point to figure out my language of painting and discuss what relationships of different iconographies conflict with one another. Sometimes these iconographies are used as stand-ins to talk about something else that embodies a similar position. Some of these iconographies are exaggerated nods to art history. For instance, with Call Me Miss Bitch, Because I Don’t Miss, Bitch, I thought a lot about the idea of a portrait and what it means in a historical and contemporary sense. Also, I thought a lot about the meaning of a “bitch” as a female dog and a derogatory name to call a woman. It’s a word that has been reappropriated several times to mean something neutral, then negative, and then reclaimed as a term of endearment (I guess). I think the title came from some random comments from social media.

You often talk about failure. The chance that failure can offer us. That failure is a real moment, a performative turn that almost has a democratizing effect because it does not prescribe perfection. That's exactly what it is when I look at your paintings; I feel taken seriously, I can laugh with your characters and enter into a dialogue with them, which is quite the opposite of most works I encounter in institutions. I'm interested in what you expect from your viewers.

I think about failure every day. It’s a part of being human. Idealistically speaking, I'm ok with that because I understand that perfection is a myth. It's best not to victimize oneself either.

I like to challenge what we believe to be a failure to think differently. I don’t think there is one correct centralized way to think, be, or create. There’s always this neo-liberal pressure that says that we are not good enough unless we reach the ideal way to be. Bad paintings are entirely unaware of themselves and the conversation they want to have. I’m not interested in bad paintings in this sense. I am inspired by how Amelie von Wulffen and Jana Euler paint with an edge. It’s a way to critique aesthetics. How you, as a painter or as an artist, in general, can manipulate aesthetics to poetically visually articulate an experience, a conceptual idea, or whatever is an essential part of the work. That aside, I like to make paintings that somehow critique conventionality or satirically play with it in some kind of way.

I don’t expect anything from my viewers. They are free to see whatever they want to see. I hope I am generous.

Are you interested in other media than painting?

I use painting because it speaks to the subject that interests me the most. I studied for my bachelor’s in photography at the School of Visual Arts, NYC, so I don't consider myself only a painter. In today's times, I don’t even think that it makes sense to think of oneself as one thing in art.

If you had to explain your work in three words, what would they be?

The perfect gift for any occasion…. Lol, that's three bonus words.