Jenna Gribbon

Jenna Gribbon expands contemporary figurative painting by foregrounding the dynamics of looking. Her portraits—often nudes or partial nudes of those closest to her, especially her partner Mackenzie Scott—stage intimacy as something both personal and deliberately constructed. Saturated colors and assertive artificial lighting push these scenes into a space where tenderness, humor, and control coexist. Her figures frequently return the viewer’s gaze, collapsing the boundary between observer and observed and exposing the power relations embedded in representation.
Gribbon often includes her own body or shadow in the frame, positioning herself as both participant and orchestrator. Props such as clamp lights, mirrors, blindfolds, and colored gels reveal the mechanisms through which images are built and consumed, while also addressing the scarcity and distortion of lesbian intimacy within visual culture. Many works originate from smartphone photographs, allowing a fluid movement between the immediacy of digital images and the material permanence of oil paint. Scott’s recurring presence functions both as subject and avatar, shifting emphasis from the figure itself toward the structures—literal and metaphorical—that determine visibility.
Across her practice, Gribbon uses intimacy to examine desire, agency, and the reciprocity of looking. Her works insist that viewer, subject, and artist remain implicated within the same illuminated space.