Inside of Brandon Friend and Jason Douglas Griffin’s studio stands an entrance to a place called the Atlantic. A realm of constant, violent motion that demands an animal will for survival and the ingenuity to craft foggy concepts into concrete. A world not unlike our own, with the distractions of the day to day minutia stripped away. To truly represent the struggle to thrive one must concentrate on the building blocks of both pleasure and conflict. Raw imagery that trickles across the triggers of our own experiences. There is beauty in struggle and struggle in
beauty. Both exist in abundance within the Atlantic. The artists’ role is to capture these visceral moments of primordial, emerging nature. The viewer’s task is to have wide open eyes, powerful beliefs and the will to survive long enough to further understand what it is to be alive.
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There will always be rules and rulers, Gods and Goddesses. Humans have the capacity to invent divinity or discover it, depending on who you ask. The thing that separates us from the beasts, the gift of seeing beyond. When falling for long enough one might stop grabbing for handles that aren’t there and simply go into themselves, finding something holy, something greater. Just as the Greeks and Egyptians and Norsemen had celestial representations of the elements of human consciousness, so must the Atlantic. The Goddesses watch from their respective domains of love, war, harvest, ice and so forth, doing no right or wrong, only observing and nurturing their culture and the many organism’s devotion of it. Iconic symbolism drawing from all of history give the them physical life, their eyes meet with yours and you become aware of a sentient presence, a palpable satisfaction too distant for a mortal to grasp. They belong to no one society, race, faith, or period. The Goddesses are timeless representations, the trading cards of life itself and the Atlantic is their playground.
– by Ryan Micael Commins Working Class Magazine