Jenna Gribbon

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.