Gray

Featured Artist: Todd Gray

Artist Statement

In Stuart Hall's 1996 essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," he quotes Franz Fanon formative classic of post-colonial theory, in a passage describing how the colonial subject, the subject of the diaspora, is formed by the gaze of the historical master [also, interestingly, and relevant, a photographic metaphor]:

The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.

This process of the fixing and fragmenting of identity - specifically the identity of those in the African Diaspora - and the violent, coercive, but often invisible way in which the gaze, and authority of the colonizer, the Master, the European, constitutes and re-constitutes diaspora (self-)identity, is the subject of my investigation.

The means of my investigation are photographic: the tools of photography, honed technically over decades as a photographer of jazz, rock and pop musicians, honed conceptually at CalArts. I have assembled, and continues to assemble, an archive of images, combining multiple images, each one isolated in a frame found in a thrift store in South Los Angeles or Johannesburg, creating larger, complex narrative works.

The images take as their primary subject the contrast between Royal and Imperial gardens in Europe versus the local flora in Ghana , where I spend part of every year. This contrast points to an underlying historic argument: that the wealth of Europe, and therefore its aesthetic history, was extracted in large part from colonial exploitation, from Aftrican bodies (fragmented) and African land. And from this contrast, which is developed in each of the photo-assemblages, develops further contrasts: between the lavish architecture of European colonialism and the ruined, even haunted remains of the houses of the colonized; between the linear Euclidian and Cartesisan modalities of Greco-European logic and the talismanic Gris Gris of the African Diasporic ritual; between ceremonial trophies and royal evocation of paradise combined with the plundered remains of a paradise that might-have-been.

It should be noted that the power and poetry of these works comes as much from what they conceal, and cut, and crop, as what they add and reveal; the assembling of individual images at the same time serves to further fragment the narrative, and in doing so draw attention to the fragmentation of identity more generally. The fragments which, per Fanon, have been - and could have only been - put together again by "another self."

Artist Biography

Born in Los Angeles, Todd Gray received both his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Solo and group exhibitions include the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Whitney Biennial, NY; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; David Lewis, NY; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; National Portrait Gallery, London; Grand Palais, Paris among others. Performance works have been presented at institutions such as the Roy & Edna Disney Cal/Arts Theater, REDCAT; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. His work is represented in numerous museum collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Canada; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles among others. He was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, and of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, Italy in 2016. Todd Gray's photo based work explores issues of black masculinity, diaspora, and contemporary/historical examinations of power. Gray has presented this work in academic conferences at Yale and Harvard University. Gray works between Los Angeles and Ghana, where he explores the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections which link Western hegemony with West Africa.

Website: www.toddgrayla.com