John Griswold’s work dissects mythological classicist tropes, fragmenting and recombining them, with all their latent meaning, within a surrealist frame of reference. He has amassed a lexicon of symbolic devices from ancient classical sources, antiquarian emblem books, baroque mythological and devotional iconography and alchemical treatises. Griswold’s fascination with the persistence of neoclassical and romantic allusions and symbolic devices, injected throughout 19th and early 20th century secret societies and fraternal organizations, and their relationship to changing frameworks of modern authority and power, permeates his work. Griswold’s training as an art conservator informs his archaic painting techniques.