Gabrielle Jo

About

I am a fine artist working across painting, installation and photography. I explore morphological approaches to painting as a way of engaging with the conception of threshold–between the physical and the metaphysical, the structural and the relational.

In communitarian environments in Switzerland and Armenia, I lived with people in vulnerable circumstances through non-profit work. These experiences of radical detachment from modern culture shaped by late capitalism, led me to reflect on the relationship between systemic structures and embodied presence itself. My central inquiry has become one of ontology: how life, that is, presence can be sustained in the aftermath of systemic rupture. I aim to express the vulnerability and the resilience of life that I witnessed through what I call ‘visual elegy’ –a form and space grounded in memory, affection, and relational being. 

I use abandoned spaces and found objects imbued with ontological tension. My visual language emphasises quiet attunement, duration and interconnectedness– resisting the closure of modernism, the excess disintegration of postmodernism, and the spectacle of capitalism driven by immediacy.

My approach both draws from and departs from post-minimalist legacy, continuing its embracement of vulnerability while re-situating it within contemporary realities of systemic crisis and persistence.