黑料不打烊

The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present a new solo exhibition, Reality Reframed: Recent Works by Todd Gray. Opening on February 22 from 6-8pm and on view through April 13, 2024 at The 8th Floor, the show will feature recent photo assemblages drawing on Gray鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渙thered鈥� humans created through colonization. Western cultural and religious projection onto these populations is still being corrected, explored, and readdressed. In Gray鈥檚 own words, 鈥渋t is so important to wrestle the narrative away from art history and re-channel it.鈥�