contact: unusmundusart@gmail.com
Bio
Jasmine Raskas (they/she) is a multidisciplinary artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. Their work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, exploring organic growth, sentience, world-building, and the relationship between inner life and living systems.
Raskas has exhibited widely across the region, with recent projects including Eternal Jungle, a large-scale immersive installation at the Center of Creative Arts (COCA) in 2023; The Observatory, a collaborative 30-foot dome installation shown at Midwest Salute to the Arts, where it received the People’s Choice Award; a two-person international exhibition at Angad Arts Hotel in 2024; and a solo exhibition at Columbia College in 2025. Other immersive projects include Backwoods Temple, an installation exploring ritual, transformation, and sacred space, and Purple Room at 31 Art Gallery.
Their work has also been shown at Duane Reed Gallery, Houska Gallery, Fenix Arts, The Foundry Art Centre, St. Louis Artists’ Guild, Art Saint Louis, St. Louis Public Library, The Jacoby Art Center, Osage Arts Center, The Stone Spiral Gallery, St. Louis Lambert International Airport, and ARTICA.
Publications and features include Create! Magazine, Gesso Magazine, HEC-TV, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, KDHX, Ladue News, St. Louis Magazine, the Jewish Light, and the Riverfront Times, which named Raskas one of three St. Louis artists to watch in 2024. Awards and support include grants from The Luminary’s Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, as well as participation in the Regional Arts Commission’s Teaching Artist Institute.
Raskas’s background bridges art, biology, counseling, and community-based creative practice. Alongside their studio practice, Raskas works in community mental health as a mental health counselor (PLPC), supporting survivors of intimate partner violence through Internal Family Systems (IFS), counseling, and expressive arts-based approaches. Their work continues to move between creativity, wellness, trauma-informed care, and community-based art practices.
Statement
I work with painting, sculpture, and installation to explore organic growth, sentience, and the hidden structures that shape living systems. I'm drawn to repeating patterns in the natural world: rivers branching across land, neurons carrying signals, roots reaching through soil, trees growing toward light. These forms interest me because they reappear across vastly different scales, suggesting a shared intelligence within matter, movement, and growth.
My process is intuitive and collaborative. I begin with observation, material, and pattern, then allow the work to unfold through ambiguity, accident, and subconscious association. The resulting forms are neither fully abstract nor fully representational. They hover between organism, landscape, symbol, and being.
Much of my work explores world-building: imagined environments where plants, structures, technologies, and inner life begin to blur. I am especially interested in the threshold where something is understood as intelligent, conscious, alive, or sacred. My work gives animistic qualities to forms that might otherwise be seen as inert, inviting viewers to consider aliveness not as a fixed category, but as a dimension of systemic intelligence.
Interview with CREATE! Magazine
"St. Louis-based artist Jasmine Raskas is a world builder, creating creatures and environments that are organic in form but alien in nature. Whether on a two-dimension surface or installed outside in sculptural form, Raskas entities have a life of their own, existing in a different plane and world."
Unus Mundus?
What Is Unus Mundus?
The term Unus Mundus means “one world” in Latin. Psychologist Carl Jung expanded upon this term to refer to the collective unconscious, a theoretical primordial and unified reality from which everything is derived. This concept emphasizes the organic interconnectedness of all parts and particles and highlights the recurrent patterns in physical, archetypal, and spiritual realities.
@unus_mundus_art
Influence/Inspiration
Saya Woolfalk, Crystal Wagner, Dan Lam, Anne Vieux, Christina Quarles, Amy Brener, Jenny Ollikainen, Meow Wolf, Lauren Clay
Selected Features
Art St. Louis, 2020
"Creatures II" Artist Q&A Series (web)
"I think the creative process is all about the balance between the energy of control and the art of letting go, the delicate process of catching an idea and molding it into a physical form. I leave space in my workflow to team up with randomness, but still come back to honor the core of the original idea. I’m always playing around with different methods of planning, or not planning, to encourage different outcomes."
Gesso Magazine, 2019
December 2019 (print)
"The sciences and humanities each look at the world through their own lenses, but don’t offer a way to synthesize a broader view of how they relate to one another. I use art to explore relationships between multiple fields of study."
KDHX Radio, 2018
Arts Interviews with Nancy Kranzberg (radio)
"Artist Jasmine Leah Raskas stops in to discuss her artwork and how creating art has helped her through challenging circumstances."
Ladue News, 2017
Art & Soul (print)
"Raskas’ ultimate painting goal embraces evolution and communication philosophical, inquisitive and sometimes just jocular, using art “to acknowledge our limitations of reason and to rethink our current understanding of reality. "