Jasmine Gregory, If you can’t have it, no one can at CAPC, Bordeaux, France
17.11.23 – 05.05.24
For her first solo exhibition in France, curated by Claire Hoffman and Marion Vasseur Raluy, Jasmine Gregory presents the exhibition If you can’t have it, no one can at the CAPC in Bordeaux. On the museum’s ground floor, it displays an immersive installation organized in three rooms diving in near-darkness. Only a few lights effects, at the opposite of the gallery entrance, make the works appear and disappear, destabilizing their perception. Jasmine Gregory, known primarily as a painter, explores a conceptual approach which aims to deconstruct the supremacy of painting as the ultimate medium praised by 20th-century white male art critics.
As Isabelle Graw writes in her well-known essay, The Love of Painting – Genealogy of a Success Medium (1), painting has been considered for centuries as the “success media” and continues to be, currently, best-selling art pieces on the market. And if Isabelle Graw considers in her analysis that painting and love go hand to hand, painting and capitalism go hand and to hand too. Something Jasmine Gregory knows very well. Something that explains the desire she feels to destroy, damage, extinguish such a medium. In her compositions, the artist goes in the margins of painting using leftovers, waste and generally a large type of objects – clothes, cheap jewelry, broken bottles, hangers, damaged flowers, food packaging – which completely bleeds the painting out beyond of the frame. Inspired by Julia Kristeva and the notion of the "abject" developed in her essay Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (2), Jasmine Gregory considers painting as a form of abjection. Painting, as a medium, sustains a profound connection with consumption, commodity, and waste under late capitalism. By incorporating domestic objects found in her studio to the paintings, she reveals an eclectic atmosphere, both charming and disillusioned, questioning the consumption of goods in a world in ruins. Such gestures undoubtedly contribute to interrogating the links between destiny, finitude, and death. Jasmine Gregory is an artist who is interested in the death of icons, whenever it’s all about painting or pop stars. Isn't everything heading towards its down demise? Isn't the destiny of all things to become a carcass?
In the first room’s installation, Jasmine Gregory makes the disruptive choice to obscure her paintings by placing black semi-transparent plexiglass sheets and display cases reminiscent of museum exhibitions or luxury jewelry boutiques in front of the works. Lit up by red neon lights, the lockers seem to signal a danger, block the access to the works and keep an impassable distance. The paintings–large abstract shapes–completely fade into the background, becoming, in such a dramatic and theatrical display, nearly invisible. Is a painting still sellable if it’s not seen ? Inspired by black nihilism, a philosophy that posits that the condition of Black people has historically been defined by nothingness and exclusion theorized by the Afro-pessimist Calvin L. Warren in the essay Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope (3), Jasmine Gregory proposes an explosive mediation of the erasure of Black experiences and lives. By the hand of Calvin L. Warren, “the American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to come.” In such a context, “black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political apostasy as the only “ethical” response to black suffering.” Nihilism, as a dissolution of hope, becomes the only way out. As the paintings themselves fade into obscurity, embracing darkness becomes the only means of survival. All of Jasmine Gregory's work is haunted by such a philosophy. Based herself in Zürich–considering that her native country, the US, is no longer a promised land but rather the graveyard of a success fantasy–she produces a sharp critic of capitalism by reproducing advertisements she observed on the streets of Zürich, one of the world's foremost financial centers. These advertisements target clientele managing significant financial assets. By replicating them, she portrays the crisis of a deeply unequal society with sarcasm and a touch of dark humor. In her work, Jasmine Gregory creates a squeaking shift questioning the relation between exploitation of black people under racial capitalism, advertisement for wealthy people of the global North and the relation of value-making in our contemporary world. This exhibition at the CAPC is a masterful and theatrical explosion of painting as a medium, embodying a profound political statement. The artist instrumentalizes her own subjectivity – as a Black female artist – to deliver a biting critique of our postmodern consumer society, in a gesture that is both an act of defiance and, finally as Isabelle Graw wrote about painting, an expression of profound love.
(1) Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting – Genealogy of a Success Medium, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2018.
(2) Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982.
(3) Calvin L. Warren, « Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope », CR: The New Centennial Review, 2015, vol. 15, no 1, p. 215‑248.
Image Credit: Exhibition view of Jasmine Gregory, Si je ne peux pas l'avoir, toi non plus, Capc Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux (17.11.2023 – 05.05.24). Curators Claire Hoffmann and Marion Vasseur Raluy. Photo by Arthur Péquin