Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to present Portals, the gallery's debut exhibition with LA-based artist Todd Gray (b. 1954). Featuring Gray's iconic photo sculptures, the exhibition coincides with the public unveiling in April of his monumental LACMA commission Octavia's Gaze for the museum's new David Geffen Galleries.
Other Timescapes
by Ekow Eshun
In Physics of Blackness, the scholar Michelle M. Wright argues that although Blackness is often defined as a "what," it is more accurate to speak of it as a "when" or a "where." In her formulation, Blackness is not a fixed or singular racial category but a collective condition–a tapestry woven out of multiple encounters of people, place and history; from slavery, colonialism, and migrations to lived everyday experience–with no one moment fully determining its meaning.
This temporal understanding of Blackness finds a powerful visual evocation in the work of Todd Gray. Portals presents a new collection of the artist's photographic assemblages in which images of European formal gardens and Renaissance interiors are juxtaposed with West African landscapes and the material remains of colonial power and slavery. Across the exhibition, Black presence in the Atlantic world is articulated as a simultaneous experience of seeing and being. Of bearing witness to, and being a participant in, the ongoing currents of history.
Paradox of Liberty (Monticello, Elmina, Akwidaa), for example, offers a striking articulation of the interlacing of individual experience with collective memory. The backdrop depicts palm trees in Akwidaa, Ghana, where Gray has a house and studio. Super imposed on this scene is a marble bust of Thomas Jefferson, photographed by Gray at the third president's Monticello estate in Virginia. Jefferson's face is itself overlaid with an image of the entrance to a dungeon at Elmina slave fort in Ghana. Entanglements stretch across history. The palm trees evoke a Western fantasy of tropical idyll even as they recall Milton's Paradise Lost and the biblical expulsion of humanity from Eden. Jefferson's likeness, meanwhile, cannot be separated from the historical record of the more than 600 enslaved people he owned and who were forced into labor on Monticello's 5,000-acre plantation.
Viewed together, the works in Portals offer a reminder of how the lives of Black people in the West have been shaped by legacies of racial othering. For centuries, a linear narrative of progress has cast people of African origin as perpetually primitive while positioning the West as its civilizational opposite, the former representing darkness and savagery, the latter, epitomizing knowledge and civilization. In the eighteenth century, such hierarchies flourished beneath a veneer of objective rationality. "The Negro can be disciplined and cultivated but is never genuinely civilized," wrote the philosopher Immanuel Kant. "He falls of his own accord into savagery." Jefferson declared that "all men are created equal" while also disdaining Black people as lacking in "memory, reason and imagination." Yet far from being "fixed in nature" as Jefferson insisted, racial identity is fluid, contingent, always-in-motion proposition. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall put it, "Black" has always been "an unstable identity, psychically, culturally and politically. It, too, is a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found."
The thrill of Gray's practice is that rather than offering a counter-narrative to the binary opposition of Western progress and Black savagery, he rejects linear thinking altogether. A precociously talented photographer, Gray began taking pictures at fifteen in the early 1970s. He documented the Rolling Stones on tour and was published in Life magazine while still in high school, and his archive now spans five decades. Yet Gray is also acutely aware of photography's origins as a nineteenth-century technology that helped sustain colonial-era systems of power and control. Inspired by Hall's insistence on the complexity of culture and identity, he wields the camera as a means of "challenging hegemony [and] breaking away from normativity."
The assemblages in Portals are constructed using both found and bespoke frames. Images are layered, offset, and, in some cases, glitched–sourced from damaged memory cards and rendered in vivid pinks and blues. The result is a series of works defined by exhilarating uncertainty: charged, unexpected juxtapositions that are "not logical but relational" in their affinities.
The exhibition's title underscores these visual strategies. Derived from portalis, meaning doorway or threshold, a portal is an in-between space–not a destination but a point of entry, a connector between different realms or states of being. In Past Imperfect (promise of amnesia), the classical façade of Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam Germany appears to open onto verdant wetlands in Nigeria. In Kind of Blue in a Silent Way #1 an image of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope is paired with a mural from Fort Apollonia in Beyin, Ghana, along with a naked silhouette of Gray.
With its suggestion of routes into "other timescapes, landscapes, or mindscapes," the title also places Gray in dialogue with a lineage of Black artists and writers who have turned to time travel and temporal disruption to explore the uncertainties of diasporic life. We might think of the time-displaced protagonists of Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Haile Gerima's film Sankofa, for example, abruptly transported from the present into the plantations of the antebellum South. Or Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, a movie narrated by an unborn child, that blurs past, present, and future in its explorations of memory, tradition and myth.
The conventional understanding of the photograph is that it fixes in place a moment in time. But Gray's works instead offer a diasporic vision of the world in which everything is connected and in motion. The future resonating with the past. The present shaped by history and memory. By legacies of oppression and dreams of liberation. And everything happening at once. So that to encounter a work like Into This Wild Abyss/The Womb of Nature is to see a dance in motion. It is to hear a chorus in attunement. It is to glimpse an expanding universe seen from a space telescope in low Earth orbit. Figures falling through the sky in a Renaissance fresco. The ruins of a colonial fort in Ghana being slowly subsumed by the jungle. And each framed image a portal, giving way to yet further realms. Yet further ways of seeing and being.
For the first time in Portals, Todd Gray invites viewers into his process by presenting a selection of his working sketches for full size works. Using found frames purchased at garage sales or secondhand stores located in historically Black neighborhoods, or acquired as discards from museums, Gray nods to the past histories of ownership that infuse these frames as material objects. At the same time, the sketches serve as testing grounds for decisions about scale, proportion, composition, and color relationships.
In an interview conducted for BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project, Gray describes a typical day in his studio:
So, I have this archive, and I always start with a base image, a very strong photograph that I recognize as good, though good is too limiting. It captures my attention, undeniably, for reasons I do or do not know. From there, I'lI start looking at my archive from Ghana and, more recently, my archive of musicians. Some of this process is just throwing things up on the ceiling and seeing what sticks. There’s some kind of tension for some reason. Maybe it’s color, maybe it’s texture, maybe it’s form. At some point, I think, Aha, oh my goodness, I recognize a relationship that poses a question that has to do with the legacy of one system and the legacy of another and how I relate to it. I recognize that it’s clicking visually and it’s clicking critically. Sometimes I stumble on it. While I’m doing all of these possible pairings, I’ll remember a picture that I took eight, twelve, or twenty years ago, and I’ll find it and get really excited and think, Oh, is this it? Yes, this will work. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. While I look in my archive for a picture from twenty years ago, I’ll stumble on something else that I wasn’t even looking for, and that’s pure gold
Todd Gray’s commissioned work, Octavia’s Gaze, will be the first artwork to greet visitors as they enter LACMA’s new building for permanent collection, the David Geffen Galleries, opening to visitors in April 2026.
The 27-foot photosculpture, like much of Gray’s work, decenters dominant narratives of Western history. Photographs and details taken from an array of locations—a slave trail in Ghana, Catholic church in Rome, and the Palace of Versailles, among others—are grounded by a portrait of Octavia Butler. Taken by Gray in the 1990s, the acclaimed author’s unfaltering stare is pointed directly at the viewer. In Gray’s words: “I just remember this photograph because it’s like she’s asking the viewer a question like—what do you think?”
Octavia’s Gaze (Study #1, LACMA) is the first sketch Gray made in his studio after being approached for the commission in 2024. While some elements of the sketch carried through to the final work, the sketch also reveals Gray’s thought process and other images he considered as he developed the monumental work.
Visitors in the David Geffen Galleries with Todd Gray's Octavia's Gaze, 2025, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of the 2024 Collectors Committee, © Todd Gray, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Kristina Simonsen.
Join us for a conversation between artist Todd Gray and Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, as they discuss Todd Gray: Portals, as well as Octavia’s Gaze, Gray’s monumental commission for the new Geffen Galleries at LACMA, opening to the public in April 2026.
Born in 1954 in Los Angeles, California.
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Akwidaa, Ghana.
Todd Gray’s photosculptures interrogate the long reach of colonization and its intersection with the built environment, the natural world, and other manifestations of historical and contemporary culture. Drawing from his extensive archive of original photographs—taken over the course of five decades—Gray composes syncopated arrangements that speak in equal measure to rapturous beauty and devastating critique. With an incisive eye for detail, Gray builds visual and intellectual connections between African landscapes and Renaissance interiors, pop icons and sculptural monuments, classical order and the digital glitch, reorienting our received notions about how to see the world.
A precocious teenager, Gray got his start as a music photographer, touring with the Rolling Stones before graduating from high school. After choosing to attend CalArts during the school’s heyday as a center of conceptual art, Gray maintained a successful commercial practice, shooting hundreds of iconic album covers and magazine assignments. A return to CalArts for graduate studies during the late 80s marked an important shift in his work, infusing his already-rigorous conceptual and technical practice with a deep engagement with post-colonial theory. As a result of his multifaceted background as a photographer, sculptor, performer, and educator, Gray has developed a compelling visual vocabulary, using images in powerful combinations that speak to the eye, mind, and body.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gray now lives between Los Angeles and Akwidaa, Ghana.
More about the artist
