Jenna Gribbon: Look Alive
Jenna Gribbon wants you to look. She wants you to enjoy the act of looking, but she also wants you to know what you’re doing. Nipples are a glaring pink. Limbs are suggestively entwined. But it’s not quite what you’re thinking. She talks to VAULT from New York about bodies, pleasure and the ethics of looking.
Image credit: Jenna Gribbon, Stormy sea tropescape, 2021, oil on linen, 203.2 x 162.5 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
“I really aim for it to be a bit confusing,” says Jenna Gribbon, about her recent large-scale paintings of her and her partner, the musician Mackenzie Scott. “Most of them are really improbable positions.”
At two metres tall, they’re imposing works. Some are a tangle of limbs. In others, bodies rise in forms like landscapes. But they’re always clearly from Gribbon’s point of view.
Talking to VAULT from New York, she explains, “One of the things that I consider the most is my relationship to the subject in the painting. What is it? How do I portray it? How do I bring awareness of the fact that I’m involved in this scene? And then, how do I bring awareness to the audience that they’re also involved?”
These recent large-scale paintings are full of theatrical references. The background of one is a parted red curtain. Another, or so the title goes, has a gushing crevice-scape. Lighting is also something Gribbon has been exploring. In 2021, for her solo exhibition Uscapes with Fredericks & Freiser in New York, she started experimenting with a cheap hardware store clamp light. The prop was a way to direct light and attention, and also think about the agency of her subjects. “The subject is wielding this power,” she notes, “this narrative power of the light.”
That idea grew into her solo exhibition Light Holding, held at Massimodecarlo in London earlier this year, 2022. In Examinationscapes (2021) the light is almost medical, held by Scott like a surgeon but whatever she’s studying is hidden from view, obscured by Scott’s hand. Other works reverse the roles or see them in the process of being ...Subscribe to read this article in full
