NORA GRIFFIN
MOVING PICTURES

February 15th - March 24th, 2024

I was on an Amtrak speeding West when the shadow of my hand on the plastic table in the café car became an animal, first a dog then a rabbit, or something else entirely. I looked out the window across the grass and industry and saw the tiny silver skyline. The scene is a pagan freeze-frame, and I remember that the first moving pictures were born from looking out of train windows, the simultaneous rush of seeing and feeling. Back in my studio, I want to make paintings that will develop like dark room photography – an invisible, slow process under red light, then all at once a form appears. The parts are fitted together. A fabric frame takes on the character of a chameleon morphing in sunlight. The animal’s surface changes color as protection, but who can explain why it changes into a phosphorescent radiance before death? N. sent me a video of this phenomenon, and I watched it again, and again, and again. So I know it’s true.

Images pile up on my studio floor and sometimes just the outline of a thing, the edge of a bonsai makes it into a painting. A children’s book from the 1980s about Disney’s Robin Hood (the fox version) and the Golden Arrow. A chunk of lava from Carrizozo, New Mexico. The cat moves through and around surfaces -- both a film strip and a shadow. Peter Pan searching for its shadow, a moving target that will elude the arrow of time. Like in Muybridge’s motion studies, where the animal becomes an emblem of motion, maybe also like a flag or a graphic hallucination. I want to conjure a time and place. For instance: the periwinkle mural on Houston Street, a razzle dazzle camouflage effect. I still dream about the adventure playground on Mercer Street that is now a glass tower. It’s Chameleon-Time all the time. As I write this, the sun is setting over the BQE, and the shudder of trucks and birds alighting on the telephone wires make me think it’s going to be an early spring.

-Nora Griffin, February 2024 

Special thanks to Naomi Treistman, Andy Braddock, Chris Albert Lee, and Matthew Fischer 

Nora Griffin was born in 1982 in New York, NY. Moving Pictures is her fourth solo painting show. For several years Griffin has worked with methods of framing painting, and the incorporation of personal imagery within abstract space. Moving Pictures builds upon her three previous shows, Liquid Days (2022) and Chartreuse (2018) both at FIERMAN, and Modern Love (2016) at Louis B. James. Other projects include: 1999 NYC Tees at FIERMAN in summer 2023 and upcoming at NADA NY 2024. Griffin has been the recipient of residencies at Carrizozo AIR in New Mexico; Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency in Granville, NY; Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY, and BAU/Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She currently teaches painting and drawing at Queens College and has been a visiting critic at New York Studio School, RISD, Cooper Union, Oberlin College, and Columbia University.