With Don’t Be A Stranger, Jessica Frances Grégoire Lancaster presents twelve paintings that explore loss and the celebration of life. The work stands as a monument to someone she loved, another painter.
Lancaster began working on these paintings during a time of mourning. As she worked using her photo archives and memories of their time together, she began to think of her phone as an urn—a modern reliquary where his texts, photos, and voice notes are preserved.
The pixelization in Lancaster’s work is a means of concealment. During a time when the documentation of our lives is stored not in the physical realm but in digitized clouds forever at the whims of corporations, the pixels allude to the idea that the images we capture are not fully ours.
The work commemorates their relationship, but these paintings are not a hagiography. They refer to the good and bad, and are a meditation on how we balance joy and grief as we continue on in someone’s absence, carrying the lessons they taught and the questions with which they left us.
Don’t Be A Stranger will be on view at 168 Suffolk Street from May 9 through June 6, 2026.
