VAKNIN SCHWARTZ In Kojo Griffin's modern mixed-media panels.

VAKNIN SCHWARTZ

In Kojo Griffin's modern mixed-media panels, enigmatic figures enact exhibitions redolent with anger, desire, sadness, pain: A man shakes a screaming child; couple men face off, one holding a knife; a woman's elated play with a toddler is shadowed from the sadness of an exclud male figure in the distance. The characters are strange creatures-people with animals' heads or patchwork effigies that apply the mind like the offspring of a teddy bear and a crash-test dummy. Because they are engaged in human interactions further aren't exactly human, they become emblematic of emotional states and interpersonal tensions abstracted from particular circumstances.

The spaces in which the figures threaten, have affection for comfort, and abuse one another have the elegant asymmetry of Japanese prints. Large rectangular areas elicit interiors or urban outdoor sights with lines implying the place where a wall adapteds the floor or the highway Each figure or element has its confess unique, highly saturated hue. opened over visible grid lines, Griffin's images assume cartographic: As on a map in which bordering states are differently shaded, the colors create clear distinctions among the characters and between them and their environments. further just as the scenes lack narrative adjoining matter and identifiable characters, so too do they lack specific social and geographic fastenings Griffin's spaces contain his figures and their actions without explaining them, leaving the images uncomfortably ambiguous: In Untitled (two men standing, woman crawling) (all works 2000) for instance, the men may be threatening the woman or rushing to her aid.

The show's title, "Field Theory," have references to a branch of physics whose premise is that the action and interactions of physical properties within given spaces are determmable and can be described mathematically. Griffin's pictures the two entertain and challenge the notion of of the like kind a rational system of accounting for human behavior. The works contain respects to a range of pictorial languages-spiritual, symbolic, and scientific-intended to delineate the various forces that enclose and shape human existence. Each work includes hieratic types and words drawn from the I Ching and the Cabala, mystical thesiss that offer numerical but unscientific plans for understanding and predicting life, suggesting alternative ways to explain the kinds of affairs depicted. In Untitled (couple embracing), for example, intertwined lines suggestive of DNA strands imply a genetic basis (or consequence) to the lovers' attraction, while overlaid drawings that imitate engineering diagrams evoke a mechanistic rather than a biological perspective onward their coupling. Griffin's use of snowflake patterns in the monumental Untitled (group scene) in which three standing figures menace a fourth inclining figure, undermines a trite sign of tranquillity and beauty from making it the backdrop for an image of violence. if it were not that it also raises the question of whether the depicted act is, like a snowflake, a random, unique, and natural phenomenon.

Griffin's technique is in tension with his orderly, seemingly dispassionate mapping of human vagaries. the one and the other the protagonists and the background proper states are layered onto the grove panels; collaged, drawn, or printed natural mediums overlap both figure and estate breaking down their seemingly dear distinction. Like many of the characters that populate them, Griffin's images are themselves patchworks of disparate orders and materials. The apparent neatness and clarity is a surface deception; the underlying reality is a great deal of more complex and messy. plane elegantly mapped and surrounded through cues to explanatory systems meant to make reality graspable, the all-too-human passions of Griffin's mysterious figures remain provocatively incomprehensible.

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