Todd Gray
Ghosts in the Machine, 2024
1111 Prospect Street (back of building)
Todd Gray’s mural Ghosts in the Machine colorfully cascades between abstraction and representation. Exquisitely composed through multiple vignettes and framing devices, the distorted images populated throughout Gray’s piece provide fleeting glimpses into various wondrous worlds. His vibrant mural combines and connects material photographed by the artist during two different periods in his career. In 2007, Gray shot digital photographs of the landscape around his beachfront studio in Akwidaa, Ghana. These photographs were subsequently corrupted by a malfunctioning memory card in the camera. The resulting files revealed highly distorted images of palm trees rendered in electrifying colors as if some sort of trickster, or ghost, had taken over the optics. Years later, in 2020, during the Covid lockdown, Gray photographed classic sculptures in the gardens at The Huntington in San Marino, California. Upon adding these files to his ongoing archive, he found that these images were also glitched, rendering similar unexpected results as those taken in Ghana 13 years before. Through combining and collaging these two mishaps, the effects of technology become an additional subject unfolding within the expanse of Gray’s carefully constructed composition. Seeking to destabilize myths surrounding the veracity of photography, Gray examines historical relationships of power exemplified through the gardens and landscapes he photographs. Ghosts in the Machine implores us to consider the effects of history and the Anthropocene era and invites us to imagine the possibility of multiple futures.
Gray’s work aims to provoke reconsiderations of long-accepted norms and beliefs surrounding photography, including the role of the viewer in constructing meaning. Born in Los Angeles in 1954, he received both his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1979 and 1989, respectively. Constructed within a layered framing system, Gray creates his compositions by stacking images on top of one another, deliberately obscuring certain elements of his photographs and striking a delicate balance between revealing and concealing his subject matter. Ranging in size from intimate to monumental, his lush photo assemblages are composed of images ranging from imperial European gardens, West African landscapes, and architecture, to rock icons and portraits of the artist himself, all carefully arranged to create critical juxtapositions that examine ideas of African diaspora, colonialism, societal power structures, and dominant cultural beliefs.
Gray’s work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Lightwork, Syracuse, New York; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. He has had solo shows in California at Pomona College Museum of Art; Palm Springs Art Museum; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; California State University, Los Angeles; Pasadena City College; and Cal Poly Pomona. His work is also held in many notable public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Museum. He is a recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Rome Prize Fellowship, Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome (2022–23); John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts (2018); Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation (2016); and the Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowship, Englewood, Florida (2015). He lives and works in Los Angeles and Akwidaa.
18' x 108'
Photos by lajolla.ca