Artist Todd Gray’s solo exhibition, "Portals," at Perrotin Los Angeles features a series of complex photographic assemblages that challenge the historical relationship between Blackness and European colonialism. By stacking framed images of West African landscapes, slave forts, and Renaissance interiors, Gray creates textured collages that collapse geographic and temporal boundaries. Notable works like "Paradox of Liberty" confront the hypocrisy of Enlightenment figures like Thomas Jefferson by physically obscuring his image with the architecture of the slave trade.
The exhibition is significant for its critical interrogation of photography as a tool of ethnographic imperialism and hegemony. Gray moves beyond the traditional view of a photograph as a fixed moment in time, instead presenting a diasporic vision where history and identity are fluid and interconnected. Through these visual "portals," the artist seeks to correct racial othering and frame Blackness as a collective, global condition shaped by centuries of movement and resistance.