ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Jenna Gribbon

Jenna Gribbon’s figurative canvases present tender, uncanny scenes of everyday life while challenging the art historical conventions of the gaze. Gribbon reckons with the patrilineage of her medium, upending the tropes—such as the artist-muse relationship—and the established approaches that she inherited. She reconceives the act of looking as a reciprocal one, marked by empathy and mutual gratification. Utilizing the alla prima technique* with a precise and animated hand, she offers unguarded glimpses into her life with her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott, as well as her young son and circle of friends.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery

Jenna Gribbon presents her solo exhibition “Like Looking in a Mirror”. Over the past two decades, Gribbon has maintained a consistent engagement with portraiture and the ways in which, through the incorporation of props and the positioning and gaze of her subjects, she can alter the viewer’s experience of looking. In a departure from recent work, which predominantly featured her wife Mackenzie Scott, the artist returns to a familiar subject, her son, in an effort to explore the replication of traits, appearance, and mannerisms between parent and child that create a sameness which extends beyond the physical into the experiential. The artist’s past work has depicted sweeping scenes that initially appear intimate, but reveal themselves to be constructed upon closer looking. However, these paintings offer a counterpoint by utilizing the large canvases to portray tighter crops of figures’ heads and shoulders, shifting the focus away from narrative towards more psychological, close-up readings. The paintings become examinations of the tensions and anxieties that arise when an artist confronts an image that closely mirrors their own. The works on view also offer a rare glimpse into the dynamics between a parent and child, where the child lives as a double or a projection of a parent, mirroring aspects of their internal self and therefore, heightening the sense of confusion around selfhood and prompting questions about perception. Reflective surfaces and mirrors play a central role in this body of work conceptually, as a device that can aid in the act of seeing and representing doubles or doppelgangers. While doubles and doppelgangers have existed throughout time and are often perceived as a bad omen or threatening force, which the artist alludes to through the use of predominantly darker tones, Gribbon’s impressionistic brushstrokes and empathetic and collaborative approach to figural painting reframe the traditionally disturbing or eerie connotation of doubles to create tender portraits imbued with care. In one example, Gribbon and her son are seen with their arms entangled around one another as their eyes look back at the viewer. The artist’s own presence in the painting, along with her stern gaze, reinforces her role as the child’s protector, as her arm lightly shields him from behind. This is one of several instances in which Gribbon distinguishes herself by her position as a secondary yet omnipresent figure, simultaneously watching after her son and after the viewers looking at the two of them. The artist explores ideas of the uncanny and projection, both literally and metaphorically by utilizing projectors as a tool to further distort an image and blur the lines between her face and her son’s. In one work, we see a close-up of her son with an image of Gribbon projected onto and partially obscuring, his cheek. The eyes, nose, and lips appear in duplicate. Though this could be a result of image manipulation, it is, in fact, the result of the physical layering of Gribbon’s image atop her son’s. The projected image of Gribbon’s face originated from a photo taken by her son which appears in several works on view, further emphasizing the artist’s commitment to collaboration and a multifaceted engagement with her subjects. While the larger paintings in the exhibition offer a physical manifestation of replication, the smaller paintings represent the physical passing on of a shared understanding. In the two instances where her son is seen cooking, it’s implied that he’ll also experience the same tastes and textures that Gribbon herself experiences. In the instance where her son is seen reading, it’s implied that his thoughts may also be shaped through the same language that shaped Gribbon’s thinking. Even though Gribbon isn’t visible in the smaller works on view, her presence looms largely in other, and arguably more significant, ways. In “Looking at a painting of Florine Stettheimer’s mother with M” (2024), Gribbon’s son is seen with Scott in front of a painting by Stettheimer titled “Portrait of My Mother” (1925). In Gribbon’s painting, as in Stettheimer’s example, the artist’s presence exists beyond the canvas in an attempt to represent themselves in the other. Taken together, the paintings in the exhibition connect to Gribbon’s larger project, in which she utilizes a cinematic approach to create scenes that appear private, but touch on universal themes; in this case, parenthood, identity, and the transfer of thought and experience between generations. While the artist often pulls from art historical references and techniques, this show exemplifies her commitment to radicalizing—and personalizing— these traditional modes to incorporate the surreal, the psychedelic, and the uncanny.

* Alla prima is an Italian phrase that means ‘at first attempt’. It refers to a wet-on-wet approach whereby wet paint is applied to previous layers of still-wet paint, often in a single sitting. Over the years, the technique has been adopted and adapted by artists from Van Gogh to Velázquez.

Photo: Jenna Gribbon, Shared warmth, 2022, oil on linen, 12 x 16 inches, (30.5 x 40.6 cm), © Jenna Gribbon, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 3/9-19/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/