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  Kojo Griffin
Reviews
  New York Times
Art Guide
By Grace Glueck

New York Times, September 28, 2001

Humans with animal heads - bears, elephants, horses - and scarecrow-stiches Raggedy Andy noggins populate the paintings of Kojo Griffin in his first New York solo show. Heavily influenced by comic strips as well as children's book illustrations, the works satirize the violence and felicities of urban life with interactive behavior that ranges from sweetly domestic to erotic to menacing.

In one, an ominous-looking elephant whose trunck resembles a gas mask tries to seduce two bear-children by holding out wraped candies in the palm of his hand; in another a clothed she-bear couples with a passive he, as a bearish photographer zooms in on the pair. In a thrid, a horse holds a gun over a crouching teddy bear as the bear looks fiercely at a scarecrow figure that seemingly awaits a dubious assignation, And then there is a painting, all innocence, in which a bear father tenderly regards a baby bear setting off on a kiddie cart.

Although figurative, the paintings flirt with other modes. Their flat backgrounds are divided into Minimalist geometric segments of color laced with free-form floral designs and ghostly lines of drawings. As for the animal-humans, who may be meant to symbolize our multiethnic culture, they manage to make fun of the Disney cuteness of animals-as-humans while suggesting that the analogy is more real than we think