Jenna Gribbon looking at Huge gaze (homophone), 2023
Painter Jenna Gribbon IsStill in Her Honeymoon Phase
“I kind of have a thing for fingers” confessed Jenna Gribbon as she stood beneath a larger-than-life painting of her body with her wife Mackenzie Scott’s finger placed delicately on her pubes. The Honeymoon Show!, a collection of king-sized paintings (and a few intimate postcard-sized frames to boot) will adorn the glossy Lévy Gorvy Dayan townhouse until January 6, 2024. The show brings us along their Thailand honeymoon, Scott reaching into a coconut, or wading nude through water, and then transports us home from post-nuptial bliss to the curtain-clad studio space that Gribbon describes as something “between a circus and late-night show.” Over the course of the show, Gribbon unspools the pleasure of watching, of being seen, and the Venn diagram where fact and fiction overlap. Since they met six years ago, Gribbon has been painting Scott and evaluating notions of muse and subject, especially the absence of representations of women who desire women therein. “I’m so compelled to make them that I have to do it” said Gribbon when asked of her impulse to depict such private scenes. Basking in the post-show glow, the artist talked to us about painting female desire, lesbians of the 90s, and a fortuitous encounter with Richard Prince.