Kyra Gregory: Home For Dinner: Solo Exhibition
Past exhibition
Overview
Kyra Gregory: Home For Dinner installation image credit Dan Watkins
Artist Statement
I am a printmaker, painter, and collage artist living and working in Queens, New York. My work is rooted in an existential search for self and community and driven by my personal experiences with queerness, relationships, and spirituality. I paint portraits of friends, roommates, and lovers that explore the nuances of queer relationships and the emotional complexities hidden in banal domestic moments. Using images of hope, despair, catholic iconography, and nauseating self awareness as building blocks, my compositions present tender reflections on queer joy and intimacy.
Exhibition Statement
"Home for Dinner” presents a series of intimate portraits that celebrate domesticity and expansive forms of queer love. Teetering on the edge of voyeurism, the work primarily depicts friends, roommates, and lovers coming together over food and drink. Permeating the show is a subtle eroticism and persistent oral fixation. Printmaking is integral to the show and many of the paintings incorporate collaged woodblock relief prints that depict catholic saints, dreams, and moments of emotional vulnerability. The repetition of these prints throughout the show creates a swirling subconscious that serves as both a declaration of love and a prayer for protection.
Installation Views
Works
Press release
Boston, MA - Opening on September 1st at LaiSun Keane, Home For Dinner will be Queens-based artist Kyra Gregory’s first solo exhibition in Boston and New England. The exhibition will feature 18 new and recent Gregory’s print collage and mixed media paintings, running from September 1st to October 1st, 2023.
Depicting their friends, roommates, lovers, and themselves conducting everyday tasks, Gregory highlights the beauty of queer domesticity and intimacy. Their tenderly rendered, expressive portraits recall the work of Alice Neel, speaking to legacies of community care and self-fashioning.
However, they destabilize the perceived contentment of their scenes by juxtaposing woodblock printed images of despair, solidarity, and Catholic iconography as surreal patterns on walls and furniture. With saints as dual symbols of protective spirituality and the existence of a larger, hostile society, Gregory speaks to the resilience of queer communities in times of crisis, a timely and hard-hitting message given the rise of systemized, anti-LGBTQ violence across the United States in the past year.
Simultaneously nourishing and destructive, eating encapsulates this duality of peace and chaos. In works like Cause for Celebration and Clementine, Gregory relishes in the ritual of consumption, a symbolism that ultimately informs the name of this exhibition, Home For Dinner.
As a queer and trans person themselves, Gregory’s meditations on joy are deeply vulnerable and impactful, transporting viewers to landscapes of unabashed care while also forcing them to grapple with underlying struggles.
Gregory graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BA in Studio Art, Art History, and Gender and Sexuality Studies in 2019. During their studies, they received the Lucas Award in Visual Arts and a grant from the Mary Quaintance ’84 Fund for the Creative Arts in order to pursue their independent printmaking projects. They have exhibited at the SPRING/BREAK ART SHOW (Los Angeles, 2022), 8 Ball Community (New York, 2020), Atelier Canal (Brooklyn, 2020), and Lucas Gallery (Princeton, 2019). They have also previously exhibited at LaiSun Keane in the 2021 group show, In Close Proximity.
Home For Dinner will be on display at the gallery from September 1st to October 1st, 2023. The artist will be present at the Opening Reception on First Friday, September 1st from 5 pm to 8 pm, and an in gallery conversation will take place on Saturday, September 2nd at 1 pm. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit the gallery’s website or contact us at info@laisunkeane.com.
