My paintings combine two realities—South Netherlandish unicorn tapestries and dated Midwestern interiors—that are both easy to tell apart because they do not belong together, and integrated because they coexist convincingly in the same space. Through careful collage, a distant past is blended into a time that is still familiar to us. While my paintings encompass large interiors and narratives, my embroideries hone in on smaller, more intimate subjects. Since embroidery has the stigma of being a homemaker’s hobby, I work from source material that rejects this stereotype.

 Utilizing the iconography of youth culture, popular branding, logos, and celebrity personalities, Griffin Goodman’s paintings and drawings present a complex devotion to self-styled identity and the contemporary phenomenon of digital narcissism. Through their free-form juxtapositions of appropriated imagery sourced from popular culture and art history, the artist creates bricolages that speak to both the hyper-layered construction of Photoshop files and the densely packed metaphoric structure of pop art.

 As an artist, I pay attention to the commonalities between people and the relationships they have with their environment. My artistic motivations and decisions draw from what I know and what I don’t, my own rational and intuitive observations, and preexisting visual and written languages. I think about painting as a space that mediates time and place, bringing together people from a globalized world and reconciling the past, present, and future into one unified form. Figures are central to my compositions.

 That first layer is a howl, a yip, a cackle in the soft morning light. I didn’t sleep well in that log cabin on the alkaline lake. The yellows poured into the room, I saw the sunrise twelve days in a row. Coyotes moaned outside all night, or maybe that was the wind? Give me peace, I wanted to feel I belonged in my skin. I was the one that wanted to exude golden light. These dogs emerged from the darkness. I watched them party all night long, and I heaved a sigh, my ribs extending out into the world and coming back in to my gut.

 To capture fragments, from here to there—a vibrant collection of figures—a poetic rumination—year after year, into the hundreds of years—all of our worlds (the journey through and beyond)—how does it feel to exist in a space that hits pause?

I negotiate and celebrate the concept of being Black with my narratives, exploration of identity, portraiture, and language. Through abstraction, representation, and assemblage I use my memories to depict the experience of being raised in a predominantly Black neighborhood. My hope is that these scenes from my journey provide nostalgia for the viewer. When it comes to innovation, I’m always in search of new ways to bring my ideas to life. Currently, I have been dissecting sneakers and attaching them in my pieces to help the viewer walk in my shoes.

 I think of painting not only as images but also as objects that act as sources of devotion and reflection. My paintings are about the struggle often experienced in attempts to articulate emotions and to provide a source through which these emotions can be felt. My attempts trapeze around the gaps in half-remembered experiences and the nearness of ideas typically seen as diametrically opposed and separate. These gaps and anti-dualistic ideas manifest in experiences of devotion, fetish, and intimacy.

 My visual language is born out of the common domestic landscape and the elements within those spaces that express a specific emotional resonance for/to/on me. Bodies, household objects, food, and nature all fuse together inside the composition to emphasize the complexity and interdependence of objects, all of which form the subjective experience I call reality. It is through the use of a vast array of color in the two-dimensional plane of tapestry that the boundaries of these forms become increasingly entangled.

 My current practice uses discarded textiles assembled to evoke personal, ancestral, and cultural memory as a form of sustenance and resistance within the patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist societal structures we currently live in. I choose to use castaway and discarded materials in the making of art objects to serve as a metaphor for the people and things that exist on the margins of society. Reclaiming that which has been disposed of and/or rejected and highlighting its beauty and richness helps to recenter my orbit around humanness as opposed to maleness, greed, and whiteness.

 Caught somewhere between romanticism, cynicism, and comedy, my work contemplates hubris, humility, and our human tendency to view the world through hierarchical structures. Set in my rural childhood town, these paintings explore the strange yet familiar intersections between the manmade and the organic, where the desire to contain, control, and optimize seems at odds with an inherent appreciation and yearning for the natural. And with these works, I seek to encourage a championing of humility over ego.