Beastly behavior

Like Keith Haring’s radiant babies entered into a Sue Coe universe of human-made horror, local artist Kojo Griffin’s visual world is an enigmatic collision of innocence and nightmare.
Just as another Atlanta artist, Joe Peragine, reworks the cuddly vocabulary of childhood — rabbits, frogs and ducks — into something more ominous, Griffin’s kingdom is a similarly gentle one of bears and somber rag dolls and serious horses whose experiences of violence and heartbreak and the labyrinth of human relationships are compounded by their fragile, child-like states.
Griffin’s untitled “Tubman Drawings” currently on display at Vaknin Schwartz gallery are the best work in a show that also features color and black-and-white prints created during Griffin’s residency at the Caversham Press in South Africa.
In one emblematic drawing, a bear-figure in a wheelchair watches as able-bodied boys play ball. In another image, a woman with a bear’s face sits on a gynecological table looking downcast as her bear-doctor officiously pulls on a rubber glove. Griffin uses his characters’ physical presence — the button eyes, the stitches holding their body parts together, the stuffed animal associations of their bodies — to create an instantaneous impression of tragic vulnerability much in the way Coe used cows and pigs in her “Scenes From the Slaughterhouse” series or the way Art Spiegelman used mice as stand-ins for concentration camp victims in his graphic novel Maus.
There is something in this juxtaposition of realism and these half-human creatures that confuses the brain in a troubling manner, which Griffin exploits nicely. Though Griffin has suggested in statements to the arts media that using these animal figures is a way for an African-American artist to avoid the issue of race, the fact that these creatures have the bodies of humans but the faces of animals suggests that on some level Griffin is dealing with race, much in the way George Orwell’s Animal Farm dealt covertly with communism through the allegorical forum of animals. As if recognizing that his audience might filter these scenarios of violence and emotional pain through the qualifying lens of race, Griffin wisely uses the non-racially coded trope of animals to elicit our sympathy, but he confuses our feelings of whom, exactly, we feel sympathy for. The work is colorblind but seems implicitly aware of how facial features or skin color might prejudice our reading of these scenes.
The clash of innocence and corruption Griffin represents is tied up with our almost bodily, innate belief in the goodness or purity of animals. The work plays into our reluctance to see animals and other innocents subjected to the same traumas as humans — whose victimization we have in some ways come to expect.
If not for their bear and horse faces, many of these characters and the scenarios they participate in would have the tutorial, clinical appearance of pharmaceutical ads or psychology textbook photos. The work, in general, takes advantage in an astute way of a desensitization that has occurred both in the culture at large, where images of degradation are flaunted on Benetton billboards, but also a certain art-world shock value that attempts to literalize and make graphic the limits of the body and the excesses of psychological and physical trauma.
One of the more disturbing images in the show is of a group of Griffin’s creatures engaged in what looks like a rape. A faceless woman lies on the ground with her lower body naked, as one figure, his pants partly undone and his body posture unsure, hovers above her. Next to him a friend seems to encourage him onward. Griffin’s interest is not strictly violence but the psychological miasma of damage surrounding it, and it is in his charcoal drawings that this eerie interzone — the heavy moments before or after a trauma and its full, emotional impact — allows Griffin’s work to be especially moving.
Instead of showing more, Griffin seems to recognize the value of showing less and adding an element of ambiguity to both the appearance of his half-animals and to his scenarios, too. While not all of Griffin’s scenes are traumatic, inter-generational tension between parents and children is certainly a recurring motif in the work. Less fear-ridden works simply depict the complexity of relationships, as in an image of a grandmotherly figure stretching her arms to embrace a bear-child.
The brown, craft-like paper on which Griffin executes his drawings gives a humility and simplicity to the images that works in their favor, as if they are doodles drawn straight from the artist’s subconscious. Such work shows the advantages in moving away from the colorful, icon and design-saturated mixed-media paintings of his past to favor these brooding, agreeably plain drawings of his animals in distress. The work feels more loaded and immediate than several prints blocked with color and decorated with a filigree of distracting details: scarabs, crosses and Hebrew lettering, which create a cacophonous buzz around the central psychological drama. The more stark and simple drawings feel more gripping in trusting the tale and not the telling.
Griffin’s latest Vaknin Schwartz show thus illustrates the advantages for an artist working backwards, paring away and struggling to discern something more elemental in his work — an act of discovery as crucial for the maker as for his audience. Though it was his color-chocked and ornate palimpsest paintings that gained Griffin the recognition that landed him in this year’s Whitney Biennial, the work seems overwhelming and unnecessarily complicated when viewed next to Griffin’s drawings.
Kojo Griffin: The Caversham Prints and Tubman Drawings runs through Jan. 13 at Vaknin Schwartz Gallery, 1831 Peachtree Road. 404-351-0035. Tues.-Fri. from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. from 11 a.m.-5 p.m.