Jodie Mim Goodnough’s “Biophilia” featured at Newport Art Museum

The multimedia work of Jodie Mim Goodnough, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History, is being featured at the Newport Art Museum’s studio gallery through Sept. 8.

Focusing on the influence of environments on one’s mental health and well-being, “Biophilia” brings together Goodnough’s work from multiple projects. The Providence-based artist works with photography, new media, installation, sculpture, performance and sound to engage with the issues related to psychology, psychiatry, health and nature.

For the series “Prospect,” Goodnough created contemporary views from the site of Victorian-era mental institutions in New England. Now the sites of condominiums and townhouses, these images tell the complicated story of psychiatric institutions in the United States. A participatory work, “Forest Therapy Pod,” speaks to the artist’s study of “forest therapy” in Japan. Her new media work “The Yellow Wallpaper” (referencing the story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) invites the viewer on an experiential journey through a reconstructed contemporary psychiatric hospital while commenting on paternalistic approaches to mental health.

Goodnough attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, and received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2013. She has exhibited her work nationally in solo and group exhibitions including at the Midwest Center for Photography (Kansas), Brooklyn Gallery, Arsenal Gallery and at Spring/Break Art Fair (New York). Her work has been reviewed in The Washington Post, Art New England and the Boston Globe.