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  Kojo Griffin
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  Kojo Griffin's first suite of montypes with Pelavin Editions inspired an article by Todd Meyers, who narrates the monotypes in a suite of four scenes. An excerpt from the article published in issue 109 of Parachute appears below:
Please click here to view the entire article

"…the content of Griffin's work overwhelms. But it is not the content alone that creates the particular force in his images. It is what is thought to be told and untold. It is a feeling that there is something withheld in these images, like a fragment that stands in place of the whole-a fragment that instead becomes a world.

Griffin creates stories through images that seem strangely intimate yet distant, at once knowable and somehow inconceivable. Each work provides a fragmented narrative-featuring animal characters in scenarios of exacting violence and wrenching sadness. These images appear incongruent-Griffin's fuzzy creatures are portrayed in ways that force a suspension of collective sentimentality. Here one finds the intersections of childhood and mourning, hip-hop vitality and ghetto death - frightfully real and fantastic…. To engage with this work is to be complicit in its unfolding fictions. Situations of mourning , loss and violence that lack certain biographies, or more specifically genealogies, that can be traced, fleshed out and rationally dealt with. The whole is not known nor does the fragment by its nature stand-in for the whole. The story is taken from the story teller; in this case, as the viewer unpacks the images they are made secure by the fictions one hopes exist, as an explanation, as a meaningful anger, which are drawn upon its surface. These images are given a history by the viewer.

Scene Four: A male bear-fox hybrid holds a bottle above his head, taking aim at an elephant that is being helped away by another bear-fox. There is anger in the eyes of the bear-fox as he raises his arm to hurl his bottle; there is fear on the part of the elephant; and there is a sense of disapproving sadness as the other bear-fox looks over his shoulder, back towards the bottle thrower…The space of this scene, this memory, is marked by a soon-to-be-realized violence, which is itself a kind of violence…

The last point is to take notice of the space in which these scenes of memory reside. Griffin's images prove that the nature of ambiguity and an affinity to locate the ordinary can slip so easily, almost absentmindedly, into the uncanny. So where do these stories, these individual scenes take place? What is the tension (and anxiety) captured in the anonymity of these images as they hover on an undefined plane, either as a solid colour field or a cacophony of geometric shapes? Griffin's work evokes a particular type of social world-often a very disturbing one-that he offers to the viewer in a compellingly gentle way. However, the place of these scenes is elusive, even as one attempts to piece their meanings together...

Griffin's images make one think that there is an inner life to the subjects of the images. There is emotion. There is sadness, anger, and grief. They themselves are thinking something. But access to that inner life is cut off: one doesn't know what is "in there." The important point, … is not that the viewer fills in the spaces, but that the viewer assumes there is a space to be filled. The fictions do not replace the "known" but they reside on their own, in their own space of memory. Images reveal stories. They practice storytelling. Nevertheless, as one moves closer to them, they too take a step. In this case, the ultimate act of uncertainty is to listen and see."

Todd Meyers is completing his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His writing and criticism have appeared in several art journals including Parachute, Poliester and New Art Examiner.