This artist’s first monograph brings together sketches, documentation and installation shots, as well as an in-depth analysis of her practice. It highlights her process of making art, from the conception of an idea to the finished work, and from the deconstruction and re-assembling of her characters’ identities to the relentless creation of new worlds.
Published on the occasion of the first exhibition in Italy by Jenna Gribbon, staged at the Collezione Maramotti, Mirages showcases a wealth of images that highlight the fluid, sensual output of this artist who, in repeatedly portraying her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott (aka TORRES), explores the implications inherent in seeing and being seen.
The catalogue of this ambitious project, held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2017, reflects on the centrality of writing in contemporary visual art practices. Documenting its slippages from printed matters to the digital realm, from voice modulations to its sculptural presence, this book celebrates the word in all its forms.
A book emerged from the need to try to tell the story of architecture in a way quite unlike how it’s usually told, in a continuous dialogue between the anthropological gaze of Armin Linke’s photos compared with the ideation process of two public works by the Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli architecture office.
The book documents and brings together two exhibition projects by Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.
Can art, literature, filmmaking, and music draw out, make visible, legible, audible, or even contestable the patterns in which our lives are held? Considering the work by Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ingri Fiksdal, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, and Elizabeth Price, this publication entertains this question.
Texts by Flavia Frigeri and Alexandra Kleeman
Design by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2022, English / Italian, softcover, 24 x 32 cm, 96 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-37-9
Published in conjunction with Mirages—the first solo show in Italy by American artist Jenna Gribbon, who has conceived it specifically for the Collezione Maramotti’s Pattern Room—the book showcases a wealth of images and essays by art historian and curator Flavia Frigeri and by writer Alexandra Kleeman.
Gribbon often depicts the people closest to her: her friends, her son, her partner, her fellow artists. Her paintings capture the intricacies and dynamics within these relationships while addressing the implications surrounding seeing and being seen. The central subject of the works in the exhibition is the artist’s partner, musician Mackenzie Scott (aka TORRES). Gribbon’s protagonist is portrayed in vivid colours and fluid, sensual brushstrokes that make the surroundings almost merge with her body—a body that is reflected, moulded, perused, made larger than life—experimenting with scale and compositions that are entirely new for the artist.
While in the larger paintings the visual energy of these images radiates from a distance—their forms becoming almost abstract as one approaches the surface of the canvas—the smaller works demand proximity, a personal movement towards and into the work in order to grasp its details and narrative.
As unique portrayals of a female universe where beauty and pleasure are political tools for demolishing patriarchal and heterosexual structures, her works engage viewers as active participants in complex relationships of the gaze.