John Gascot paints in his gallery this month. (Photo by Jennifer Ring)
People are Latin Pop Artist John Gascot’s favorite subject. He’s painted people of every size, shape, color and gender during his 20+ year career as an artist, but he’d never painted anyone voguing — until this year.
Gascot is bringing his new ballroom-inspired collection to The Werk Gallery in St. Petersburg this December in a series of celebratory paintings. “Category Is” will feature a selection of 10-15 pieces in the space.
Watermark spoke with Gascot about ballroom culture and storytelling through art. He says he found his inspiration in Afrofuturism.
Gascot was working on his first ballroom sketch when he received an email from The Studio@620 seeking art for “Bridges: Future/Present, Future/Past,” part of the 2nd Tampa Bay Afrofuturism Festival. He read the description and immediately thought of ballroom.
Afrofuturism is a genre of literature, art, film and music with many definitions. The email Gascot received spoke of Afrofuturism as an antidote to cultural erasure.
Gascot wrote back, “Well, yesterday I started sketching this painting about ballroom culture, which was started by queer brown and Black people who are constantly being under erasure. But later, it was appropriated by people like Madonna, by white culture. This seems kind of like a perfect piece.”
But the more he thought about it, Gascot realized that he didn’t want his ballroom story to end with a single piece in a single show.
“I wanted to do a whole show and not just one painting.’” Gascot says. “Because there are so many categories in ballroom. I want to do dips, and I want to do duck walks, and I want to do femme realness. So I reached out to Matthew [Barnes, at The Werk Gallery], and I was like, ‘Hey, is this something that would interest you? And just on the sketch, he was like, ‘Let’s do it.’”
This openness to new ideas is one of the reasons Gascot approached The Werk in the first place. He also enjoys the gallery’s opulent, boutique style — and then there’s the name. Werk is slang for bringing a mix of attitude and vigor to a performance.
“The Werk was the first place I thought of,” Gascot says. “I could just show my own work [at The Studios@5663, which he owns], but I wanted to bring it over there and give them a taste of what’s going on here.”
For Barnes, Gascot’s pitch came at exactly the right time.
“John came to us and it was like an answer to a prayer,” Barnes explains. He was planning a holiday show that he hadn’t announced, so he leaned into Gascot’s ballroom idea, considering additional ways to bring ballroom culture to Tampa Bay.
“Ballroom has been around since the 20s in Harlem,” Gascot notes. “But it kind of blew up around the 60s, 70s, 80s, and it seems to be making a resurgence after [the FX series] ‘Pose.’”
Ballroom had its heyday in New York City in the 80s. Jennie Livingston documented the scene in the now classic film “Paris is Burning.” As parents disowned their LGBTQ+ children, leaving them homeless, they found family in the ballroom community, often taken in by house mothers who gave them shelter and community.
Gascot’s collection includes one such character.
“I want to make her really out there, but like somebody that the community would respect,” Gascot shared while creating the piece. “I want to make her opulent and kind of gaudy, but at the same time warm and exuding protection because that’s what mothers do. They picked up strays — people who had been kicked out by their parents and stuff like that, and they offered them a semblance of family.”
It wasn’t easy to be an LGBTQ+ individual or a person of color in the 80s, and being both was even harder. “Paris is Burning” shows how these challenges inspired different ballroom categories, like executive realness. In the 80s, when there weren’t many opportunities for POC to become executives, the fantasy played out in balls.
“If the category is executive realness, you want it to look like you’re the CEO of a company,” says Gascot. “And whoever is most convincing at that wins. Or if it’s an opulent, Marie Antoinette-type category, big ball gowns are part of the presentation.”
“The categories are endless,” he continues. “There are as many as you can come up with. There are categories that are famous and traditional, but then they come up with new stuff.”
Gascot will paint at least 10 different categories for the show. He began the process by “jotting down some categories that I knew — face, dip, mutha” and “working my way through them as I went to see what I felt like sketching next.”
The people painted in “Category Is” are like characters in a ballroom story. They come from his mind. Although he sometimes paints portraits for people in his style, the performers depicted in these paintings aren’t real people.
“When I paint, I feel like I’m creating my own world,” Gascot says. “That’s the fun part of it for me. I think that’s why I don’t necessarily work with models or set up a still life. Because I like creating it.”
To bring the opening reception for “Category Is” to life, Barnes and Gascot reached out to their connections to find local vogue performers. That was how they met Vodou Revlon, who will vogue live.
Gascot looks forward to seeing Revlon vogue around his paintings.
“I think it will be great, great stuff to share with people who follow me or the gallery,” Gascot explains. “And just to give examples of ways that you can combine different art forms.”
Gascot enjoys making his artwork interactive. Just as people place themselves within Gascot’s “Diversity in Democracy” mural at 556 Central Ave., commissioned in 2020 as part of an LGBTQ+ Equality Voters campaign, Gascot hopes to see people pose next to, or in front of, his ballroom-inspired paintings at The Werk this December. Because of their large size, Gascot says they’ll make a great backdrop for selfies.
So strike a pose and snap a selfie next to Gascot’s “Category Is” paintings this December. And don’t forget to tag the artist @JGascot and the gallery @TheWerkGallery on Instagram.
“Category Is” will be held Dec. 1-29, 2023 at The Werk, located at 2210 1st Ave. S., in St. Petersburg. The opening reception, featuring a ballroom performance by Vodou Revlon, happens Fri., Dec. 1. from 5-9 p.m. Learn more at TheWerk.Gallery.
