Installation view of Todd Gray / MATRIX 186, March 4–June 20, 2021. Courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Todd Gray, Sumptuous Memories of Plundering Kings, 2021, Fourteen archival pigment prints with UV laminate in artist’s frames, 84 3/4 x 341 x 5 1/2 in.
Courtesy the artist and David Lewis, N.Y.
It was sociologist Stuart Hall who led Los Angeles artist Todd Gray to rethink the nature of his work. The prolific Jamaican-British theorist, who died in 2014, was noted for his profound examinations of power and the ways in which culture can be deployed to maintain a certain order. In resistance, he noted, there is also power.
“Those ideas inspired Gray to exert his own resistance by rattling the conventions of photography. “I started using round frames, I went from 2-D to 3-D, I stopped using glazing,” he explains. “It led me to challenge the assumption of what it meant to properly exhibit a photo.”
For his latest solo show, which recently opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., the artist zeroes in on colonial power and the ways in which it can manifest in barely perceived ways.
“Todd Gray / Matrix 186,” as the exhibition is titled, features a series of works that juxtapose photographs of European imperial gardens with scenery the artist photographed during sojourns in Africa. (Gray, a former commercial photographer, uses almost all his own imagery — except for the occasional Hubble Space Telescope shot of the cosmos, which he downloads from the internet courtesy of NASA.)
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