The Brooklyn Rail

Spectacle permeates Jasmine Gregory’s work, albeit a peculiar sort of spectacle, clumsily comprised of banal objects. A dazzling panoply suspended from the ceiling at MoMA PS1 contains a number of illuminated light bulbs jumbled together with collapsed wine cups, plastic bags, wrapping papers and mesh, tinsel, and unplugged wires, evoking a vanitas still life painting. The bottom end of the box hangs open, exposing its internal viscera filled with miscellaneous leftovers. Unlike the video of orderly supermarket shelves projected on the far wall, the glittering vitrine does not seem to be for display. The case feels abandoned, wet, and dripping with semi-transparent paints. Six new works comprise the exhibition, and their respective titles, such as the ceiling piece “I have a million dollar figure … but it’s all loose change.” (all works 2024), add cynical tones to the incongruous mishmash, amplifying their vanity.

The projected video on the wall is a part of the piece One Time Shot, which purposefully lacks sharp screen quality. Off-frame, crooked, and partially filtered through cellophane, creating a wrinkled effect in the imagery, the DIY video seems to have been taken by a hidden camera or phone, so as to be unnoticed by others or perhaps even the artist herself. The supermarket aisles appear accidentally filmed, with the camera frequently turned upside down, except for some browsing moments that coincide with the artist’s point of view. Acting from the capricious shopper’s vantage point, the camera shifts abruptly and hastily, pausing at arbitrary price tags, labels, and package designs among the abundant choices, representing impulsive and messy consumer behaviors. Against the backdrop of excessive shelves, and coupled with the beeping sounds of barcode scanners, the shape of the video often changes when the artist’s body, hands, or random objects mask or pass over the lens. Gregory’s camera recurrently loses focus, and eventually the blur, in slow motion, subsumes all the imagery. The vérité feel of the video is dissimilar to surveillance camera footage or vlog videos with clear focuses or directions. It illustrates the modern consumer’s endless doomscrolling amidst the overloaded choices in the supermarket—not that of luxury or glamour.

The fluctuating video terminates around a still photograph, attached to a white panel that leans against the wall. Curator Jody Graf identifies it as a portrait of the artist with her mother dressed in a purple silk dress, taken at a Glamour Shots franchise when Gregory was a child. Like a gift package, the photograph is loosely covered by polka-dotted cellophane, though the wrap seems unfinished with a heap of metallic silver tinsel scattered on the floor underneath, evoking a tacky, cheap, and fractured look. The top of a Prada shoe box, a used paint palette, and a bottle of Comme des Garçons perfume sit upon the tinsel, all overshadowed by the surrounding tawdry installation. Tucked away behind the propped up panel is an exhibition catalogue from the Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille featuring Francisco de Goya’s Time and the Old Women (1810) on the cover—a vanitas painting that mocks the ladies’ futile preoccupation with youthful beauty.

The allegorical message runs through the monotonous tableaux on the other walls, two from Gregory’s “Investment Pieces” series (No.7 and No.8), which are deadpan, hand-painted copies of Patek Philippe ads selected from the watchmaker’s “Generations” advertising campaign. Such a deliberately dull approach enhances the paintings’ superficiality. As every artistic possibility ends at the surface, Gregory compels uninspired viewers to pay attention to the ads themselves. The Swiss luxury watch brand’s famous tagline, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation,” appeals to modern patrimony. The ads boast of longevity and inheritance while eclipsing the truism of vanitas—the transience of life. The Generations campaign featured white men exclusively; the only trace of female presence is in the artist’s brush. Adjacent to one of the hand-painted ads, Gregory placed two abstract paintings, Vacant Land Available for Rent! and Find Your Dream Home!, on either side, highlighting their flat voids studded with coarse glitters.

The exhibition exposes the lure of capitalism and its forgotten, behind-the-scenes operations, captured in the variety of scraps, debris, and copies—from a makeup palette to perfume, gift wrap, and luxury ads—all of which are made and promoted to brush up on the quotidian reality. Yet, Gregory retouches the manufactured products—video, box, and watch advertisements—with her hands. She resculpts the video frame and the ceiling box, packages or paints them, and copies the ads by hand, flaunting organic flaws and imperfections. The most eye-catching components in the exhibition are the moving image and the lit box featuring ordinary objects, while the luxury ads induce numbness with their humdrum use of mimesis. Gregory brings this tension between the mundane and the luxury to the gender divide—women (the artist) in the supermarket versus the glamorous but patriarchal watch advertisements. She raises questions about the dynamics between the real and the made-up, the exclusive and the common, heritage and transience, and finally, the ways in which these are gendered. By championing the spectacle of the mundane over the luxury, she shows us that glamour is dead.