CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/14/2020

In Todd Gray's work, beauty as weapon and comment on colonialism

This detail of "Euclidean Gris Gris (Love and Happiness)" (2019) is reproduced from Todd Gray: Euclidean Gris Gris, the artist's provocative, generous and superbly produced monograph exploring of the legacy of colonialism in Africa, which he will be signing today at Frieze Los Angeles. "I wanted to broaden the scope of the conceptual foundation of my thinking," Gray says in conversation with artist Carrie Mae Weems, "I wanted to create a wider opening for folks to enter into a dialogue with my work, and I wanted to use beauty as a weapon. It was important to me to explore how… European gardens developed due to riches historically acquired through the slave trade and through African colonization. We see these gardens and we don’t realize where the wealth came from to create them… I think the gardens are a way to talk about Western man's need to control nature, bodies, surroundings."