Jenna Gribbon
The pleasure and politics of looking
“A common misunderstanding is that my work is about intimacy. It's just as much about a sort of constructed intimacy or consuming what we think of as other people's intimate moments, which maybe aren't intimate at all.”
What does it mean to look at another person? And how does that change when you are a woman looking at the woman you love? Tenderness, love and care are painted into the soft pink hues of Jenna Gribbon’s oil paintings. Body parts dominate huge canvases. She almost exclusively paints her wife, musician Mackenzie Scott. She describes their relationship as “reciprocal musedom.” They find a new queer meaning of the word ‘muse’ – one built on consent and freedom rather than directional power.
Gribbon wants to change the dynamic between the viewer and the subject. Her smaller works are ‘documentary pa...
What does it mean to look at another person? And how does that change when you are a woman looking at the woman you love? Tenderness, love and care are painted into the soft pink hues of Jenna Gribbon’s oil paintings. Body parts dominate huge canvases. She almost exclusively paints her wife, musician Mackenzie Scott. She describes their relationship as “reciprocal musedom.” They find a new queer meaning of the word ‘muse’ – one built on consent and freedom rather than directional power.
Gribbon wants to change the dynamic between the viewer and the subject. Her smaller works are ‘documentary paintings’. They capture her wife in quiet moments like drinking a glass of water (M with a Tattoo Bandage, 2020) or burning incense while naked in the kitchen (Palo Santo, 2019). Her large scale paintings are theatrically staged, with clamp lights and velvet curtains. Her wife poses in them, aware she is being looked at, and looking back often with intense eye contact. In dialogue with each other, the paintings interrogate the distinction between the private and the public self.
Jenna Gribbon (she/her) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1978. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Gribbon was fascinated with art from an early age. Since art education at her school was very limited, she fell in love with it through books and on television.
“I’m always interested in the way that people are seen versus the way that they think they are or the way they want to be”
