It has long been debated that Bob Dylan’s folk song, “Girl from the North Country,” was written about Echo Helstrom, his high-school girlfriend from Hibbing, Minnesota. When we began our conversation with Minnesota-born, Kansas City-based Rachel Gregor, whose own work depicts a distant memory of friends and families in her childhood in the upper midwest, Dylan’s visual language in “North Country” lingered in my mind. Songs and paintings of memory, childhood, the life lessons of folk tales and ballads, are just some of the ideas that Gregor has been exploring on the precipice of her new solo show at Hashimoto Contemporary New York, Cruel Babes, opening on November 16th. Where do we retain our histories from? Gregor is getting to the…