Last year, at the 38th annual Collectors Committee weekend, LACMA had the opportunity to commission a new artwork by artist Todd Gray to be displayed in the David Geffen Galleries. After working on the commission for over a year, Gray recently visited the new building to oversee the installation of the piece, titled Octavia’s Gaze, and provide insight into the ideas behind a remarkable work that invites visitors to rethink art history.
Gray creates three-dimensional assemblages of framed images, combining his photographs of landscapes, people, architectural details, and museum interiors. Like much of his recent work, Octavia’s Gaze interrogates dominant narratives of Western art history, deploying its often beautiful forms to emphasize the lived experiences of those denied representation within them, particularly African peoples who were colonized and enslaved.
“It talks about histories—not history, but histories in the plural,” Gray explained, highlighting the multiplicity of stories often obscured by fixed historical narratives. LACMA’s aim in the Geffen Galleries is similar to the artist’s, as the building proposes new ways of thinking about exchanges of aesthetic ideas and objects across place and time, employing cross-departmental displays to discover unrecognized resonances and connections, as well as gaps and absences. Instead of strictly delineated zones, galleries and interstitial spaces will flow into one another, organized in loosely arranged “oceans.” Octavia’s Gaze has been installed in the building’s Atlantic section.
Extending 27 feet long, and requiring a team of five specialized art preparators to install over the course of three days, Octavia’s Gaze imagines, from a personal, 21st-century perspective, what an archive of Afro-Atlantic transit could look like, beginning, on its left side, with a photograph of lush greenery in Ghana. “I imagine that perhaps my forebears walked down this trail because that’s a historically documented slave trail in operation 300 years ago,” Gray said. “It connects village to village to village, ultimately to end at the Atlantic.”
Alongside the scene from Ghana are other photos by Gray that portray, among other things, artwork from Palazzo Pitti in Florence, natural scenery from a fjord in Norway, and African sculptures located in Belgium but originally from the Congo, once the site of colonial horrors led by Belgian King Leopold II. On the right side of the work is a portrait of author Octavia Butler, who lends her name to the work. “I had this photo session with her in the '90s,” Gray said. “And I just remember this photograph because it’s like she’s asking the viewer a question like—what do you think? And so it ends with the gold-leaf frame to really show the value of Octavia.” Although the celebration of Octavia is evident, her expression is ambiguous, and the multifaceted nature of the work means there are no easy answers about the rest of the content.
Like much of the artist’s practice, Octavia’s Gaze questions not only conventional art historical narratives but the fundamental elements of photography itself. “What I want to do with my work is contest and resist that history of photography, and really do something that contests what is supposed to be a proper photograph and how a photograph is exhibited,” Gray said. Rather than a flat, rectangular, glass-plated photo, some of the images that make up Octavia’s Gaze are round or triangular, none are displayed behind glass, and all are layered to create a sculptural, three-dimensional piece. “I can’t decide if it’s a photograph or a painting or a sculpture,” the artist said. “Every time I look at it, it changes.”
“If you stand in front of a photograph, you’re seeing the whole thing,” Gray continued. “In this work, it’s really dependent on where you’re standing. Part of the photograph is covered by the next frame in the photograph. So that way you realize that you’re participating in the construction of the meaning of the work.”
This processual, experiential nature of the work is crucial to its content, implicating the viewer as an active participant as they construct their own narratives during their encounter with it. “I like the fact that the work is unstable,” Gray said. “I want viewers to realize that the photograph is only showing you part of the story, and there’s a much bigger story.” Visitors will be able to experience Octavia’s Gaze in its entirety and continue this story when the David Geffen Galleries open next year.