Jeremy Kost

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1977. Lives and works in New York, N.Y.C.

Jeremy Kost is a tireless chronicler of gender, sexuality, and nightlife. He regularly travels the world to capture images, whether they’re of male models in the Californian desert or drag queens strutting through Pittsburgh. Strongly influenced by Warhol, both in his choice of subjects and technique, Kost extends the creative potential of some of Warhol’s favorite tools – the Polaroid camera, silkscreen processes, and more. In Kost’s work, Polaroid images not only serve as the basis of silkscreen paintings but are massed together in elaborate, multilayered photo-collages.

« Beauty and poise in all of their many guises are ever-present in the photgraphs of Jeremy Kost. So, too, are their polar opposites–those traits that they long to cover, eradicate or depict–ugliness and insecurity. The two binarisms go hand-in-hand, much like a dark queen peering into her mirror and questioning the perceived beauty of her reflection, the delicate poise she has practiced again and again. And in Jeremy Kost’s Polaroids that capture the underworld of New York City’s club scene, the “other” world of fame and celebrity, and indeed, the exalted world of beatiful go-go boys and sideshow freaks, the queen in the image is not necessarily that of Walt Disney’s doing, but instead an outlandish persona who represents the beauty and ugliness in us all. Kost’s Polaroids become the ultimate Warholian mirror of that which we desire, that which we fear, and that which we will never be. »

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall, Curator’s Essay by Eric C. Shiner regarding Not a Play Area, 2007