Wall text from Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start at the Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma:

"Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start examines the influence of modernist painting and early video games on Griffith’s practice and explores the opportunities and limitations of both. His reductive visual vocabulary describes idealized landscapes of an obsessively imagined 'virtual' reality. Griffith’s paintings, digital prints, and installations appropriate familiar spatial and narrative devices from video games to express notions of play, exploration, and achievement. The relationship of symbols, actions, and reactions, add an additional, but subtle, layer of personal narrative throughout the work. Griffith’s utopian longing for landscape, informed by both real and invented space, sets the stage for a quest. The common goal-oriented nature of video games can be seen as a parallel to the pursuit of meaning, knowledge, and joy, through painting."