VALLEY HOUSE GALLERY

Miles Cleveland Goodwin:
The Soul and the Skin

January 18 – February 15, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18 // 5-7pm
preceded by Artist Remarks at 4:30pm

Sing praises to earth’s creatures who have endured millions of deaths.
To the real gods who roam this land creating music from breaths.
It is our affairs that ignite fires of beauty from hand,
May we withdraw for a time to let them heal this land.

It is the purity of flesh and the warmth of fur,
Or an unusual offering causing the soul to stir.
The bone, the antler, the lungs and the teeth,
Form a gentle maiden and a death of a thief.

Lost magic created by ages of innocence,
Sculpts a thick atmosphere of lust and omnipotence.
Let their love help me create the work in which I try,
From the soul and the skin to whisper a faint goodbye.

—Miles Cleveland Goodwin

Valley House Gallery is pleased to present our sixth solo exhibition of paintings by Miles Cleveland Goodwin. Born in Biloxi, Mississippi, Goodwin spent his youth in the South, and currently lives in Georgia. He earned his BFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. His work was exhibited recently at Anima Mundi Gallery in England. Two paintings have been added to the permanent collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans: “Lucifer” and “Prisoner of War.” His painting “Resurrection” is in the permanent collection of The Grace Museum in Abilene.

The essay “A Southern Howl: Thoughts on Miles Cleveland Goodwin” by Bradley Sumrall, Curator of the Collection at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, will be included in the catalogue being published in conjunction with this exhibition.

In the essay, Bradley Sumrall writes:

“The great Mississippi writer, Barry Hannah, famously said, ‘The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.’ The paintings of Miles Cleveland Goodwin do just that – they howl. Goodwin’s paintings cut through the noise of our contemporary sensibilities, laying bare the human condition through his own brutally honest depiction of his little corner of the world. As a contemporary painter and sculptor based firmly in the rural South, Miles Cleveland Goodwin draws inspiration from his own dark, rich and fertile imagination and from the landscape – including the flora, fauna and folks who reside there. His complicated and intuitive narrative paintings are executed in a rough expressionism, often exploring concepts of mortality, struggle, place and cultural identity. At its core, his practice is that of a visual storyteller. The stories Goodwin weaves through his paintings resonate with the Southern Gothic literary tradition – stories of family, religion, race, community, morality, and the land. They are tales of a place steeped in tradition, filled with natural beauty and haunted by the past – a past of lost empire, of lost causes, of old cruelties. Painting both the real world around him and the startling world of his dreams, his surfaces are saturated with a deep sense of place and the burden of history.”