Todd Gray’s photographic assemblages explore the history and enduring impact of European colonialism, slavery, and the African diaspora. A personal subject for the artist, his family has been unable to trace its lineage beyond three generations due to the legacy of slavery. To create new work, Gray mines his extensive archive of photographs created over decades of travel, then selects and juxtaposes images of African subjects and sublime landscapes, formally-designed European gardens, and dazzling Hubble Space Telescope constellations. Framed individually in different styles of thrift-store frames, new frames, and old museum frames, the artist layers and stacks the images in dynamic overlapping compositions of two to or more photographs. Breaking all the rules of formal presentation, Gray conceals and pairs imagery to take us on a complex journey about identity through Africa, Europe, and the cosmos, and through time and space.
For his MATRIX project at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Gray embraces the experimental nature of MATRIX program to expand his practice with his most ambitious work to date: a fourteen-part work exceeding thirty feet in length. The scale and imagery will envelop the viewer in a historical, cultural, and spiritual experience that directly connects with the renewed contemporary discourse to face past and present transgressions.
