Anna Meliksetian and Michael Briggs are pleased to present Portraits, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Todd Gray and his third solo show at the gallery.

In this new body of work, Gray continues to re-contextualize photos from his own archive, structuring images to both conceal and reveal simultaneously. Influenced by the writings of cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014), Gray’s latest works contains a plurality of critical narratives exploring diaspora and contemporary/historical examinations of power while engaging the viewer to be an active participant in the construction of meaning.

For this exhibition, Gray extends the visual language of his ongoing Exquisite Terribleness series, characterized by images Gray made while working for Michael Jackson as his exclusive photographer in the 1980s, offering complex representations of blackness, the African diaspora and the African landscape itself. Several of his new works include images taken during Gray’s recent stay in Italy as part of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency. Portraits of other residency participants, writers and leaders among them, are juxtaposed with landscapes of the wilderness in South Africa and the manicured gardens of the estate in Italy as a counterpoint, provoking a critical visual dialogue.

Through his use of collage, multiple narratives are offered for the viewer to engage and untangle, resisting a single iconic narrative. “Antique” frames found in South Los Angeles and more recently in Johannesburg are used as structuring devices to create sculptural collages. The used, often well-worn, frames carry historical markings from the domestic spaces they once inhabited and are signifiers of both taste and class.