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Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art

Todd Gray: Timemachine Series

ToddGrayTimeMachine

 

Todd Gray: Timemachine Series 2016

 

 

 

 

About:
Todd Gray is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. While Gray’s work most often takes the form of photographic installations – wall works composed of re-contextualized images and frames – his practice also spans performance and sculpture, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally defined as having artistic merit.

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No 1.

Gray’s fluency in high and low culture reflects his experience as Michael Jackson’s personal photographer. His works raise questions around the cultural merit of photography as both a personal and universal method for recording history and identity, leading us to a more pointed critique of the corporate capitalization of black identity within popular culture. Grays image based installations are comprised of re-contextualized photographs from his archives. Images of Michael Jackson sit upon coastal Ghanaian landscapes, his face obscured by a far panning view of the galaxies; these collisions of iconic photographs, visibly connected through found and discarded frames, provide a glimpse into the many narratives and stories, to the possibilities, that often lie dormant within the images we are familiar with.

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No 2.

Todd Gray received both his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Luckman Gallery, Cal State University, Los Angeles; Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson; Detroit Museum of Art, Detroit; Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago among others. Performance works have been presented at institutions such as the Roy & Edna Disney Cal/Arts Theater, REDCAT, Los Angeles, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 2016.

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No 3.

Gray was selected for inclusion in the third edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in LA: a, the, though, only, curated by Aram Mosheyedi and Hamza Walker in June 2016, where he presented a performance work for the duration of the exhibition, outside the confines of the museum space.(text and courtesy MOMO Gallery)

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No 4.

From August 31 2017 on MOMO shows new work of Todd Gray: Pluralities of Being.