From Yonder Wooded Hill

As an exploration of folklore, family, and place, From Yonder Wooded Hill investigates what we choose to remember versus what chooses to remember us. Based in the Patapsco River Valley of Maryland and expanding to his ancestral West Virginia and North Carolina, Riley Goodman brings to life the customs and legends on which he was raised to weave a tale as old as the hills.

Riley Goodman, raised in the Patapsco River Valley of Maryland, combines folklore, American history, and humankind’s relation to the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this manifests through the passage of time. Informed by the compositional styles of cinema and painting, Goodman weaves a vast visual narrative inspired by everything from historical accounts and folk-based storytelling to dreams and familial legends. Goodman’s work becomes an ever-occurring presentation of history via the use of artifact and ephemera. By establishing this crafted world, Goodman invites the viewer to question tenets of authenticity, leaving the idea of ’historical truth’ in an undisclosed middle ground.