Jenna Gribbon has opened a new exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in New York in which her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott, appears as a mythic being rather than simply a muse. Projections, on view from 6 November to 19 December, is the gallery's first presentation of the artist's work in New York.

Gribbon has painted Scott for close to a decade, but the new works change the terms. Using a film projector, she superimposes photographs of her own naked body onto Scott's, so the two women appear fused into single figures. In Kali, the largest painting in the show, Scott's form becomes the blue-skinned, many-armed Hindu goddess, with a bright pink nipple at the centre of her chest. Other canvases turn the couple into a harpy, the two-faced Janus and Artemis of Ephesus.

The approach tackles a familiar question in Gribbon's work: how do you really see someone you are intimate with? She has described the difficulty of looking at a partner without projecting yourself onto them, and the new paintings make that problem literal, showing what it feels like to try to see someone while getting in your own way. The layered figures also confront a stereotype about lesbian relationships, the idea that partners merge into one identity, by staging that merging as something monstrous and strange rather than sentimental.

Alongside the large paintings, the show includes small works in warm, natural tones that record domestic life: a kitchen table, a small self-portrait, a wife gesturing mid-sentence. Gribbon is also the subject of Entwined, her first solo museum exhibition, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, on view through 3 January. That survey spans twenty-five years of painting and includes three works commissioned for the show.