On view May 27 - June 21, 2025
Opening reception Friday May 30 from 6-8pm

Chozick Family Art Gallery is thrilled to announce LOADING DOCK, a solo exhibition by Raphael Griswold exploring printmaking, everyday materials, and the role of individual agency under a militarized sky. Over a dozen works, some displayed leaning against walls, will fill the space for Griswold's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
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LOADING DOCK presents a two-pronged body of work, including artist-made cardboard sheets and small paintings made on found individual-use cardboard boxes whose subject and form originate from images recorded by the artist from the specific vantage point of the artist’s studio loading dock. A lone plane soaring over the New York skyline, blurs of helicopters, the silhouette of a tree—obscured by error and image degradation in layers of offset printing or the fallibility of watercolor. Griswold's studio is located in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a repurposed transport hub built by the U.S. military 100 years ago. 

For the past three years, Griswold has assembled and collaged multi-plate photomechanical offset lithographic prints generated with his commercial printing press to create his own cardboard, assembled through a laborious process of collaging and folding. The result is a series of paintings that refer to consumer packaging and shipping materials. This body of work considers transport logistics and ubiquitous, often hidden or unapparent military infrastructure.
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The exhibition also includes a series of small paintings made on cardboard packaging sourced from products the artist consumes, like processed food and bicycle innertubes. Here, the focus of each composition is a tree that lives at the periphery of the Brooklyn Army Terminal’s pavement, antagonized by the comings and goings of trucks, trains, earth moving machines, birds, people, the weather and trash. The recurring imagery of the open sky with its attendant helicopters and drifting clouds simultaneously references human aspiration and impending destruction. Though Griswold uses the same vantage point to produce imagery for both series, each piece evokes a different mood influenced by seasonal cues and local activities.
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In harnessing commercial printing technology and physical materials utilized in shipping logistics, shopping, and human consumption, Griswold explores the scaffolding of the militarized world around us. Dredging up images through an informal research process that begins with noticing, standing, and looking, Griswold illustrates and explicates themes of industrial production, materiality, and unnoticed military presence in daily life. Throughout the exhibition, the posture of the artist's careful act of observation parallels that of the viewer who intently looks at Griswold's dreamlike compositions; LOADING DOCK challenges the audience to reconsider the physical and political spaces they inhabit.

Raphael Griswold (b.  1984 in Boston, MA) is a Brooklyn-based printmaker and an educator at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Griswold earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Since 2006, Griswold has exhibited work in solo and group shows in the US, Spain, and Belgium. He trained as a fine art printmaker at Wingate Studio in Hinsdale, NH, and worked on projects by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Shepard Fairey, and Walton Ford. Griswold has been a part-time faculty member at Pratt Institute since 2015, teaching BFA and MFA printmaking and drawing. He considers teaching an extension of his art practice, where his relationships with students and the inquisitive, experimental nature of his courses offer a reciprocal effect to his studio practice. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

For more information please contact rebekah@chozickfamilyartgallery.com
For press inquiries please contact angella@ang.works