🎨#ArtIsAWeapon #ExhibitClosing "Todd Gray: While Angels Gaze" closes at the Lehmann Maupin New York on Saturday, March 29.
📍501 W 24th St, #NYC, 10011
🎥✍️🏾 reposted from @lehmannmaupin Todd Gray’s solo exhibition, ‘While Angels Gaze’, is on view at our New York gallery through March 29.
Here, the artist speaks about his work from his studio in Los Angeles, offering firsthand perspective on his photo assemblages.
In his newest body of work, @ToddGrayLA integrates Roman Catholic imagery and architecture with photographs sourced from his own archive, including self portraits, images of the Ghanaian landscape, and figures from pop music. The mining of his multi-decade music photography archive is an important component of Gray’s practice and one that offers a view into the history of music, featuring recognizable figures from Al Green to Iggy Pop. In ‘While Angels Gaze’, Gray combines these titans of the music industry with images of Roman Catholic cathedrals and ancient Roman statuary, drawing parallels between religious or mythical personages and the idols of today. In these compositions, modern pop stars are cast as the contemporary equivalents of historical figures—where societies might once have inlaid images of saints in golden basilica ceilings or erected statues of religious leaders on building facades, modern idols play on elevated stages to crowds of tens of thousands, becoming enshrined as mass media icons.
Throughout the exhibition, Gray’s lens extends beyond imaging pop icons, with some works devoid of figures all together. In works like these, Gray moves beyond celebrity adoration to examine the veneration of other false gods—commerce, wealth, power—exploring the enduring nature and consequences of such idolatry across centuries.
📹 Film by Jeremy Eichenbaum
#ToddGray #ArtExhibit #Artist #BlackArtist #LehmannMaupin #BlackGirlArtGeeks
