Meg Cranston & Todd Gray

Glue All 

Presents section of The Armory Show, New York March 7 - 10, 2019. VIP previews Wednesday, March 6th, by invitation.

Pier 94, Booth P8

Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present Glue All new works by Meg Cranston and Todd Gray made especially for the Presents section of The Armory Show 2019. Through collage, both Cranston and Gray shift the rhetoric of the image from the declarative to the interrogative.

Todd Gray selected quote:

“Culture is the way we make sense of, give meaning to things, the world. Culture is a system of representation. . Reality does not exist outside the process of representation.”

Stuart Hall, “Representation and the Media”, dir. Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 1997.

Meg Cranston selected quote:

“If collage has been one of modern art’s major techniques, the reason is that its technical forms obey a more fundamental aesthetic-political logic. Collage, in the broadest sense of the term, is the principle of a “third” political aesthetics. 

Collage can be realized as the pure encounter between heterogeneous elements, attesting en bloc to the incompatibility of two worlds…. Conversely, collage can present itself as that which brings to light the hidden link between two apparently foreign worlds…. The issue here is no longer to present two heterogeneous worlds and to incite feelings of intolerability, but, on the contrary, to bring to light their causal connection linking them together. “

Jacques Ranciere, “Problems and Transformations of Critical Art: Aesthetics and Its Discontents,” 2009.

Meg Cranston’s work California collages images of pain medication and plastic chairs taken from a supermarket flier, with an image of  “some girl” (her mouth doubled and with face obscured by a greatly enlarged drain cover), some onion rings, and the word California.  The aesthetic logic is tightly controlled. It is a bilaterally symmetrical composition with echoing bilateral pairings using a split compliment color harmony.

The work seems funny because the obvious aesthetic logic is so weirdly paired with its pathos. Cranston says, “I often use a rigid formal or visual strategy as neutral starting point. I add elements to the composition that fit the “neutral” organizing principle versus selecting things for their literary or political content. For whatever reason, the work that seems most “political” never starts there. I try to create sameness and harmony through visual similarities but in so doing uncover discord - strange political and psychological connections.”

In Todd Gray’s work, through his use of collage, multiple narratives are offered for the viewer to engage and untangle, resisting a single iconic narrative. Gray uses frames gathered from South Los Angeles and Johannesburg thrift stores as a structural device to contain his photographs. The used frames carry historical markings from domestic spaces and are signifiers of taste and class. Stacking framed photographs on top of each other provides a physical depth and optical depth causing shifts in perception, destabilizing the inherently fixed nature of the photograph and it’s ability to freeze time. 

Gray’s works exist as low relief sculpture, the angle of view effects what is revealed or concealed in the piece, encouraging the viewer to actively engage the work visually. Partially obscured images he made of Michael Jackson, taken from his own archive appear extensively in the work. Jackson is the most recognized black man globally - in Gray’s work he represents blackness and the African diaspora. The pop culture icon is an opening, usually the first point of entry into the work for many viewers. The pop culture imagery is combined and contrasted with the timeless African terrain and images from the Hubble telescope, representing AfroFuturism, (these appropriated images of the cosmos in Gray’s work are the only ones not his own) in a critical visual dialogue.

Meg Cranston on the title “Glue All”

The title is a reference to collage and is it collaged from elsewhere. I always liked the name of this Elmer’s glue product.  It reads like a command – Glue All! It would make a great bumper sticker.