Granville Carroll
Granville Carroll (American b. 1992) is a visual artist and Afrofuturist working with digital technology, poetry, and alternative processes to reshape the world. Carroll’s artwork explores photographic representation and vision to understand the process of existence and interpretation. Simultaneously, he explores and expands ideas around racial blackness to encompass spatial blackness, temporal blackness, and spiritual blackness. Carroll highlights the imaginative qualities of the human mind through world building and storytelling to discover new futures and states of being. At the core of his practice is the investigation into metaphysics and the ontology of self and the universe.
Carroll earned a BFA in photography from Arizona State University in 2018 and a MFA in photography and related media from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2020. His work has been shown in the United States and internationally. Most recently his work has appeared at the JKC Gallery in New Jersey, Northlight Gallery and Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona, and in Italy for the Time in Jazz Music Festival. Carroll currently resides in Rochester, NY where he recently completed an artist residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Fall 2021. Carroll has been named a 2021 Silver List artist and a 2020 Critical Mass Finalist. His work has been published in a variety of physical and online publications, interviews, and features. Most recently his work was published through What Will You Remember, Brink Literary Journal, Lenscratch, Humble Arts Foundation, and Black Is Magazine.
Artist Statement
We are finite creatures grasping at the idea of expansion and understanding the origins of the universe. How often do we look inward? How important is it for humanity to look at the inner space of self instead of solely looking at the external material world? In the Finite, Infinitely is a meditation on these questions.
This project is inspired by the Transcension Hypothesis, which examines humanity’s next step in evolution and how advanced civilizations ascend to inner space. As we continue to advance, our technology and ourselves condense into smaller packets of information. Dense matter and particles of energy create black holes or portals for life to transcend and evolve. I speculate what that process looks like by interpreting inner space as our psyche. Concepts of creation and destruction, life and death are embodied. I imagine the origins of the universe and the transmutation of matter over time. These constructed spaces and figures conceptualize the process of evolution from the beginning to the end of time.
I imagine how the universe unfolds and crystalizes into matter and how truth finds us within our inner spaces. These images are in constant flux, moving through nonexistence and presence. There is an exchange of silence and energy communicating the painful embrace of the universe’s inferno and the healing powers of the imagination. In the Finite, Infinitely is a meditation on the philosophical principle of immanence, where there is no separation of object and subject, space and matter. I construct a space where this plane of being is accessible. New spaces and landscapes emerge from the void of nothingness, of Blackness. In this place the figure is transformed into a conduit through which the cosmic forces dance, entwine, and reverberate. Space-time collapses and what emerges in its absence are new states of being.
Release Date: July 29, 2022
As I peer into the darkness of space, pondering the origins of existence, I can’t help but feel a sense of surrender. I watch as the universe unfolds, and particles crystallize into matter. The human form disintegrates and merges with the foundational elements of fire and water. Our minds are intertwined with the patterns of life and death, the body slips away. Like a fractal turning upon itself, energy, matter, and consciousness are transmuted repeatedly. The circle mandala is present to remind us of the cyclical and endless formation of devolution and evolution.
Surrender, 2020
Renascence, 2020
Release Date: January 20, 2023
Renascence is, “the revival of something that has been dormant.”
Interstellar matter resides in the emptiness of space. It condenses into a humanoid form, awakening what has been sleep for a time not yet conceived of. Fire erupts, cosmic matter and particles collide, and consciousness flows. Ase (vital source of life and matter) surrounds the being, giving it life and movement. Blackness evolves beyond the confines of form and returns to its originating source, the void. Death emerges. Life departs. Spirit ascends. What is left is the existence of Blackness in cosmic authority.