In her latest solo exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary New York City, Cruel Babes, painter Rachel Gregor reconsiders folk tales, ballads, and myths through a personal lens. The Kansas City-based artist casts different versions of herself as the characters in these stories, referencing compositions and figures from well known paintings in the art historical canon to create her mis-en-scène.
Before her solo exhibition opened, Rachel spoke with writer and Bay Area curator Katherine Hamilton about major themes in this new body of work.
Katherine Hamilton: Girlhood has been a thematic throughline of your artistic practice. This exhibition takes a different approach to it, looking at the experience through the lens of folk tales and history. To start, what have you learned about girlhood—yours, the experience in general—as you’ve continued to engage with and pull from the experience over the years?
Rachel Gregor: Overall, I’ve learned that I have to feel some sort of empathy with the characters I depict in order to feel equipped to build an image-based narrative. So, drawing from my own experiences or moments in my life means that I have to feel empathy and compassion towards my past self or people that I have known, no matter how embarrassing or painful those recollections might be. I’m very introspective, and being able to look back and maybe remember one instance or a sensation, I can build off of that and morph it into an image that is far from a literal depiction of some life event. I’m continuing to find that putting how I felt, or at least how I remember how I felt, into an image, and not words, is an intriguing and abstract process and the outcome usually ends up surprising me a bit.
Did you feel like you learned or began to reconsider the experience with this body of work?
With this body of work, I was drawn to the idea of depicting scenes from specific stories first, and as I worked out the compositions in my sketchbook, I then reflected them back to myself. I had to ask myself, “Ok, I want to depict these characters, but who are they to me? How does this story fit into my own experience? What was the original intentionality behind this narrative, how did that change over time, and how is it still relevant today?” and then I started to draw parallels. It almost became like dream interpretation, kind of cryptic and vague, but once I found how it fit into place, it started to make a lot of sense. There might be visual vernacular that only I understand, but the specificity is there and I hope that intentionality comes across to the viewer.
The starting point for these new paintings was stories: ancient myths, traditional folk lore, and ballads. Can you highlight a couple of the stories you’re referencing in these paintings? Were there certain narratives on your mind before you began this new series?
The first song I knew I wanted to translate as one of my paintings was The Babes in the Wood, which is from the 16th century, but is probably much older. The story can be seen as a morality tale about taking care of orphaned babies, or as a nursery rhyme to children warning them of the dangers of going out alone. The song becomes very mythic and has a very rich history, and as a result, many murder cases involving young victims found in the woods became known as “Babes in the Wood” cases. I was drawn to the many iterations and interpretations of the song, but I struggled with how I could reflect it back to myself, until I started to see the song as a tale of loss of innocence, and loss of friendship. This reflection process then carried me through solving how I wanted to retell the other narratives I was drawn to. The first composition I realized in this group was “Actaeon's Hounds” however, and I drew heavily from Titian’s Diana triptych. The work of Titian really drove the idea of these scenes feeling performed or rehearsed, but stumbled upon by the viewer, as though you’ve walked into somewhere you shouldn’t be.
You also mentioned that the works are filtered through your own life and experiences—often why the characters in the painting resemble you. I don’t want to imply that each work is a self portrait, but that there is a part of your own story in each painting. Were there any stories, ballads, that felt very personal to you? Like they were already a part of your life?
Some compositions are more self-portraits than others, the most personal at the time was actually “Actaeon’s Hounds.” My sweet but sassy and reactive rescue Australian shepherd, Maggie, who I had for eight years passed away a few months before I started working on that piece. That composition is a direct result of that loss and was a way for me to process the relationship I had with that dog, and another family dog who passed away a few years ago, Misty. I liked how the story of Diana acquiring Actaeon’s hounds and having them devour their old master was kind of tongue-in-cheek analogous to adopting a dog that may have been mistreated or wasn’t given the best opportunity. Having a reactive dog, you have to protect them from themselves, and in turn they want to protect you, and it’s a complicated, beautiful, stressful, but ultimately rewarding relationship. That composition I would say is the most literal self-portrait, I see it as myself playing the role of Diana, rather than a morphed, vague variation of myself.
Ballad singers of the 18th century were another influence for the stories in this new series. What’s your relationship with music like this? Did you grow up listening to folk songs or even folk music?
I think my taste in contemporary music naturally led to a curiosity in Folk music. Growing up we did listen to a lot of Country & Western like Sons of the Pioneers. My parents also played a lot of Jimmy Buffett, I mean a lot, who has his roots in Country and folk music and is a great story teller. That, combined with other 70’s folk revival, informed a lot of what I like in music or what I find nostalgic. I picked up a banjo in my 20’s and when I started teaching myself I learned a lot about Appalachian Folk, but who really grabbed my attention was Peggy Seeger. She has a fantastic archive of Folk songs she’s recorded and has done a lot to get field recordings of different variations of traditional folk music. That’s when I really started looking hard at the narratives of a few songs, at how different singers take different approaches with the lyrics to bend the meaning. These songs can encompass so much about the experience of the singer even if they were written by someone else, centuries earlier. Not just listening to the music, but trying to learn and play and sing it myself really gave me a deeper appreciation for what I was researching.
I was also curious about this idea of appropriating motifs without bringing the empathy or meaning of it into a recontextualization. You pull deeply from art history in your practice—Titian, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Goya to name a few artists. When you’re pulling from these artists whose works have been copied hundreds of times, how do you honor it? How do you recreate a motif and feel confident you’re bringing empathy and meaning to it?
I leaned into art historical appropriation fairly hard with a few of these paintings, because it felt so fitting with the tradition of ballads and folk music in general. Borrowing poses and referencing The Masters in painting sometimes can feel a little mechanical, or that maybe it can be taken for granted, it’s what painters have been doing since painters have been painting. I wanted to be very intentional with how I approached it and consider when I borrow a motif, whether compositionally or narratively, how it serves my new piece.
While looking at ballads, specifically the tune ‘Cruel Mother’, I learned that it was originally written by a man, as a way to shame women for abandoning their children or having an abortion, but over time, the ballad singers - poor, impoverished women who were often prostitutes, bent the meaning of the song to be more sympathetic. The song was about them! Through their choice of this song, in some way, they were able to reclaim some dignity and ask their listeners for sympathy, because they might also have had to make heartbreaking decisions.
It’s the same approach when I look at paintings from the past that I admire. It’s understanding the original intention, appreciating why it’s good or why it works, but then shedding past associations so it can take on new ones. Manet’s Dead Toreador became one of my ‘Babes in the Wood’. The Toreador would have been a spectacle, he was an entertainer in front of a crowd we cannot see, his death was loud even though the composition is so painfully quiet. I wanted that sense of stillness—the Toreador is alone and I hope that sense loneliness transcends into my figures. The pose and association itself also helps to signify to the viewer what might be taking place in the narrative, but it’s also not necessary to have an art history degree to get what is going on. Knowing the reference isn’t crucial.
I think Goya was especially fascinated by the occult and his own mortality, he became very reclusive late in life and that’s when we get some of his most unhinged compositions. His figures can be very allegorical, and don’t really represent an individual but an idea, and I think maybe that is where that lack of engagement comes from - they are actors playing out these fantasies. Female figures so often become the stand-ins for a male painter’s emotions or they are didactic, allegorical beings, regardless of how actual women were treated in society during that time or how they saw themselves in this work. But that isn’t to say these images weren’t compelling! I love painting, I love the history of painting, but the perspective we get on Western society from when these master works were created is so, so narrow, almost always through the lens of a male painter or patron.
Including so many animals felt kind of inevitable when dealing with folklore and myth. There’s a reason why animals are so prevalent in our stories and fables, they serve as vessels for emotion and help explain human nature. I could have easily edited them out, and kept the paintings with just human figures, but then I felt like that would have been the coward's way out. It was frustrating trying to figure out how to include birds in a painting without them looking incredibly cliche but with “Babes in the Wood” I saw the robins as undertakers or some sort of allegory for death, and once I noticed that I couldn’t not include them.
Animals are also frustrating because there’s the issue of what to use for references. I prefer from life, or working from drawings I did from life. I ended up using porcelain figurines as the references for the robins so I could light them the way I wanted and do as many studies as I wanted. They ended up having this kind of vacant expression that I really enjoyed. For the dogs I had to rely on photos and using multiple source images to study from to find the poses I wanted. I’ll admit that with “Tam Lyn”, that did feel like a fun technical challenge as a painter. My friend has a Great Dane who is appropriately named Goya, and he served as my model. It was surprising how difficult it was to wrap my head around his proportions!
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from all of this, is that there is no way of controlling what is carried on to future generations or how your actions or intentions today will be interpreted later. I think I’d like my personal story to be a quiet one, and hope that my paintings can stand on their own in the future.
To inquire about Rachel's work, email nyc@hashimotocontemporary.com.
To learn more about Rachel and her work, you can visit her website at: www.rachelgregor.com. To read more of Katherine's writing, you can visit her website here.
