Chelsea, New York
Todd Gray
Reality Reframed
The 8th FloorThe Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present a new solo exhibition, Reality Reframed: Recent Works by Todd Gray. The show features recent photo assemblages drawing on Gray’s extensive archive of photography from the last forty years. Throughout his photographic practice, Gray frequently defies the conventions of photography, destabilizing the primacy of the image and the traditional construction of pictorial narrative. Combining seemingly disparate or dissociated images into a single work, he leads the viewer to question or construct the story he poses. Gray’s formal and metaphorical methodology steps beyond text-driven historical storytelling through his use of oval and rectangular frames of varied scales and historical periods, depicting rich built environments. Gray’s work often opens with beauty and closes with the dark, inherently grisly histories of global colonial subjugation, human trafficking, and ideological manipulation that enabled the aestheticization of the Old World, which was paid for by the New. Ostentatious and meticulously manicured European gardens, such as the Versailles gardens depicted in his work, contrast the more discreet legacy of forced displacement for “othered” humans created through colonization. Western cultural and religious projection onto these populations is still being corrected, explored, and readdressed. In Gray’s own words, “it is so important to wrestle the narrative away from art history and re-channel it.” Collectively, the assemblages, or “photo-sculptures,” feature postcolonial narratives that, while sited both historically and politically, retain a poetic quality, allowing the audience to enter the work and engage with its myriad subjects. Each particular piece, the artist writes, is “the consequence of my embrace of a polymorphous, shapeshifting mental construct that is at the foundation of my art.”