Miles Cleveland Goodwin | In The Belly of the Beast (Searching for a Heart)

About

‘In The Belly of the Beast (Searching for a Heart)’ is a three floor solo, exhibition from Miles Cleveland Goodwin, his first in the UK.

Miles Cleveland Goodwin’s deeply rooted upbringing in the American South is of inescapable significance when viewing the extraordinary, phantasmagoric realism and haunting naturalism of his emotive and deeply personal artwork.

The artist frequently and unsentimentally evokes themes of nature, presence, solitude and mortality - conjuring a stark and ambivalent beauty of a place that is often simultaneously unsettling yet deeply soulful, evocative of what the Romantic poet Alfred Tennyson claimed as “red in tooth and claw”. As Goodwin humbly states “My instinct is to salvage the forgotten and unappreciated and elevate the discarded. I want to paint things that have a spiritual integrity - paintings that attempt to show the truth of life. My painting is all that I have to let the world 

know how I feel. I’m not very good with other forms of communication. I feel a responsibility to be a public servant, to show you things with love, no doubt coloured by a melancholy soul.”

Born in Biloxi, Mississippi and now living in Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains, Goodwin’s form of ‘Southern Gothic’ authentically embraces familiarity with complex mystery and contradiction, where the seen and unseen reflect the tension and harmony which exists between realms of realism and the more supernatural. Goodwin’s unsentimental vision reflects both personal and wider histories, truths and narratives, hinting at underlying and persistent trauma and struggle, where some of the ghosts that haunt the past, linger into the present. His symbolic visions never shy away from darker or more uncomfortable aspects or remnants of reality where the subject of slavery, racism, fear of the outside world, inequity, violence or the grotesque, could be addressed in an attempt to seek a form of transcendence, thus embuing his works with an overriding sense of hope acquired through their ultimate seeking of truth. process of physical and metaphysical transformation. The disperate emotional effects of the universe we inhabit, allow us the potential to retreat or to transcend towards a greater sense of separation or a wider unity, where we and all become one.

“There were two crows sat on a tree, Lardy hip tie hoddy ho ho
There were two crows sat on a tree,
And they were black as crows could be. Lardy hardy hip tie hoddy ho ho

The old he-crow said to his mate: What shall we have to-day to eat?

There lies a horse in yonders lane,
Whose body has not very long been slain.

We’ll press our feet on his breast-bone, And pick his eyes out one by one.”

- ‘The Two Crows’ from ‘Folk Songs of English Origin Collected in the Appalachian Mountains’, sung by Ada Maddox, May 3, 1918

ABOUT MILES CLEVELAND GOODWIN

Miles Cleveland Goodwin was born in Mississippi and lives and works in Georgia, in the Appalachian Mountains, USA. He graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon in 2007 with a BFA in painting and printmaking. His work has been widely exhibited in the US including at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the Grace Museum and the Amarillo Museum of Art among and can be found in collections worldwide including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. ‘In the Belly of the Beast (Searching for a Heart)’ is his first solo exhibition at Anima Mundi.