PRESENTATION:Todd Gray-Church and State

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 Gray composes syncopated arrangements that speak in equal measure to rapturous beauty and devastating critique.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Brick Archive

Over the past decade, the work of Todd Gray  has steadily grown more ambitious in scale, form, and content. His complex photographic assemblages mix images of historic European cultural sites of wealth and splendor (palaces, museums, churches) and locales associated with the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa; these are interspersed with photographs of African American cultural icons, all drawn from Gray’s archive. The results are tone poems that reflect on African American identity and the rise of Western civilization as both are undergirded by and inextricably linked to colonialism.

In his ambitious solo exhibition “Church and State”, presented at The Brick in Los Angeles, Todd Gray deepens his long-standing interrogation of Western hegemony, imperial history, and the diasporic condition. The exhibition merges monumental new photographic assemblages with a rich repository of personal and professional archival ephemera, tracing a compelling arc from Gray’s early career in commercial photography to his status as one of contemporary art’s most incisive visual theorists.

Dividing his time between Los Angeles and Akwidaa, Ghana, Gray rejects the notion of the photograph as a flat, neutral document. Instead, he treats imagery as a physical, sculptural raw material. In “Church and State”, this multidimensional method becomes a powerful instrument to dismantle linear historical narratives and expose how twin pillars of authority, religious institutionalism and state power, continue to govern global consciousness and social structures.

At the core of the exhibition are mural-scale, multi-panel photographic compositions that demand an active, physical engagement from the viewer. Gray entirely bypasses digital collage, opting instead for a tactile process of physical layering. Individually framed archival pigment prints, protected under UV-resistant glass, are mounted directly over one another in complex spatial arrangements. The smaller, foregrounded frames partially hide the larger images behind them, creating a dynamic tension between revelation and erasure.

Through this method, Gray weaves together three distinct visual registers: the opulent architecture and manicured landscapes of European imperial power, the coastal and forest vistas of West Africa that mark historical points of transatlantic trauma, and intimate references to Black cultural identity and personal memory. The physical obstruction within each artwork acts as a direct metaphor for historical redaction and forgotten archives, compelling the viewer to piece together fractured realities across time and geography.

Running parallel to these large-scale assemblages is an extensive collection of biographical material that illuminates Gray’s formative years growing up in post-war Los Angeles and his early professional life photographing iconic musicians. This archive provides crucial context for his conceptual evolution, demonstrating how early exposure to the mechanics of celebrity, media, and representation informed his understanding of how Black bodies and cultural labor are framed and commercialized.

“Church and State” operates as a formal dismantling of the sovereign gaze. Through his practice of diasporic dislocation, Gray unsettles linear historical trajectories, constructing counter-archives that resist colonial closure while asserting the primacy of Black memory, spatial complexity, and self-determination.

Photo: Todd Gray, Heart of Darkness in Eden’s Garden, 2026, Two UV pigment prints on Dibond in artist’s frames, 107.6 x 155.3 x 5.7 cm | 42 3/8 x 61 1/8 x 2 1/4 inches, Photo: Paul Salveson, © Todd Gray, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Info: Curators: Hamza Walker, Hannah Burstein and Storm Bookhard, The Brick, 518 N. Western Ave. Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 18/10/2026-20/1/2027, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://the-brick.org/