MUTAL MUSEDOM
WITH
JENNA GRIBBON
& TORRES

The recently married pair discuss the reciprocal nature of romance with a fellow creative, their instant connection, and their recent bodies of work — GRIBBON’s painting exhibition The Honeymoon Show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan as well as SCOTT’s latest record as TORRES, What an Enormous Room, released this past week on Merge Records. 

“We have so many conversations about our work, and our own creative worlds,” GRIBBON says. “Sometimes we're able to enter a space that's co-created — a psychological space, an enormous room that we occasionally get to dance in together…”

Read their full conversation below.

JENNA GRIBBON: Hi, baby. 

MACKENZIE SCOTT: Hi, baby. 

JG: So, we'll do this interview style, ok? So, your new record — how is it reflective of where you are right now in your life? And what are some of the ideas that you're exploring in this new record?

MS: OK, so the new record is called What An Enormous Room. It's an album about creating space where maybe you feel like there hasn't been space previously made. It's an album about dealing with anxiety and moving through uncertainty. And I think that that's really representative of where I am in my life right now. I also think it's representative of where—I can't speak for everybody in the whole world—but it does feel like everybody I know is in one way or another feeling stuck somehow in their lives. And maybe that's because of uncertainty and maybe that's because of confining factors that are not coming from within but from without. Climate crisis anxiety and wars and laws being made that take away bodily autonomy… All of these things are factors that make me personally feel very anxious and very restricted. So, the idea with this album was to really bring to life the idea of creating hope and space and energy and movement where you're not perceiving there to be any.

JG: I love that idea. I love the idea of an enormous room that's kind of like a psychological space of your own creation. It's sort of like Virginia Woolf — like a room of one's own. But it's huge and it's whatever you want it to be and it's wherever you want it to be and it's whatever you need it to be.

I think that's a really beautiful idea. I would like to create a psychological enormous room for myself. I'm gonna think about that.

MS: How about your most recent body of work? The Honeymoon Show, tell me a little bit about that. And how is it representative of where you are in your life right now?

JG: Well, it's pretty literal, since we just got married last year. So where I am in my life right now is in a new home, in a new marriage with a new puppy. And so we're in this sort of honeymoon phase of life.

And my show is about what it is to really see someone from up close. It's about intimacy, but it's also about the ideas that we project onto other people, whether it's the person close to us or the narrative of someone that we don't know. It's about what we know and what we don't know about other people and their stories. It's about questioning those narratives that are fed to us about other people's stories. And it's giving them a piece of our story, but also giving them the tools to think critically about what they're looking at and whether or not certain moments are authentic or whether they're constructions that you and I created as a story to put out there in the world. 

JG: It was a little convoluted, but..

MS: I get it. I think other people will get it too, especially if they look at the paintings. 

How do you feel about working alongside me on your respective project while I'm working on my own musical project? What does it feel like to be with someone who's making things too?

JG: I really enjoy that aspect of our relationship. Something that I talk about a lot is this idea of reciprocal musedom. To me, it feels a lot better to make work about you knowing that I can reciprocate and I can be in your work when you're in my work. Because especially in the history of painting, that musedom has been typically very one sided and kind of like vampiric or something. And in our case, we sort of get to feed each other creatively. And I find that really exciting and something that I haven't seen a lot of in the history of painting specifically.

MS: I feel the same way about making records alongside you making paintings. I definitely think it makes the art better and I know it makes the relationship better. For me, it makes the relationship endlessly interesting and it makes me feel constantly curious about what you are thinking about— what you're thinking while you're making what you're making. 

It also makes me so curious about what you're going to make in the future, which is really fun because I think in our own ways we're building worlds. When you build a world, you get to live inside of it for a little while. I'm constantly excited about the world that you're making. If anything, I have questions about how you get from point A to point B and how you even get what I think are brilliant ideas in the first place.

I'm so not just curious about the technical virtuosity that you are obviously putting on display all the time. But I'm so curious about your brain. I mean, sometimes it feels like we're on different planets but that's really exciting for me. I think there's enough connection there to keep us grounded, but I think feeling like we're in different worlds a lot of the time is really exciting for me because it just keeps things from being boring and it keeps me constantly curious about how I get to your world and how I fit into your world. And it always puts a new lens on what I'm doing when I look at your paintings and when I hear you talk about [them] and what you're trying to do.

JG: Yeah, I think back to the idea of the enormous room. I agree that it does add a lot of excitement and interest to our relationship because we do exist in separate worlds where we're separate vessels, you know, going through this life. But when we have so many conversations about our work, and our own creative worlds; sometimes we're able to enter a space that's co-created—a psychological space, an enormous room that we occasionally get to dance in together.

MS: It's very romantic baby.

JG: You know me…

MS: How did we meet?

JG: We met in a bar. I was with my friend, Annie Hart, and she was going to meet a friend of hers who is a friend of yours, and it was a kind of last minute decision to join her and go meet her friend. And I showed up and there you were.

MS: That's true. I was with my friend Matt Hit, and I don't know how he feels about being implicated in this story, but our friends were meeting up with one another and we were drinking at Saint Dymphna’s on Saint Mark's, which was my favorite bar at the time. RIP Saint Dymphna’s. And Jenna walked into the bar one late August evening and I shook her hand and I was completely stunned and I instantly knew—I don't know how—but I instantly knew that I was gonna try to marry you. I knew it. I know you don't believe me.

JG: I believe you. I mean, I think for both of us there was a moment of recognition and for me, I didn't know what I was recognizing or who you were, but it's only happened to me a few times in my life where I've had that experience where it's just in a flash you sort of know that this is a person of significance for some reason or other. And for me, I don't often know what it is but I definitely… I don't know how to describe it except there was a moment of recognition when I saw you.

MS: I felt the same. What made you know there was a special bond between us? 

JG: Uh…

MS: Was it you wanted to have sex with me?

JG: I mean, I think that the ease; the instant sort of bodily ease in your presence, was an indication of something to me. Like, you know, we pretty much were instantly in physical contact at the bar.