Exhibition Review: the hidden order of the whole
the hidden order of the whole © Todd Gray
By Zoha Baquar
Calculus is a beautiful thing. The word itself originates from the Latin term for ‘small stone’ or ‘pebble’ –– very fitting for a branch of mathematics that studies how variables change by looking at them in infinitely small pieces. Its beauty lies in the fact that before calculus was invented by the likes of Newton and Leibniz in the latter part of the seventeenth century, all of mathematics was static: the geometry of the Greeks could only help calculate objects that were perfectly still. But the universe is constantly moving, from the stars in space to subatomic particles or cells in the body, and the way in which we come to understand it is continuously moving too.
the hidden order of the whole © Todd Gray
Inaugurating its new location at 57 Walker Street, NY, and on display from September 9 to October 30, 2021, David Lewis Gallery’s latest exhibition, the hidden order of the whole, features large scale colour works by Todd Gray, each consisting between two to five archival pigment prints framed with UV laminate. The largeness and physicality of Gray’s works alone is impressive and most unique to the artist, owing to his characteristic use of frames to actually arrange the multiple images within each collage. As well as the sculptural expanse and craft this credits Gray’s work, it is also a matter of framing, or rather reframing, assumptions about high-art photography and, more pressingly, knowledge about historically Western powers and the African diaspora.
the hidden order of the whole © Todd Gray
So what does calculus have to do with this?
Each of Gray’s assemblages in the hidden order of the whole is a site of two-pronged aesthetic proximity, that is, a nearness of one distinct thing to another in space and time. Gray first achieves a visual proximity between distinct objects in the practical construction of his works. In his remarkably red-stained venus, Gray pairs the French art and architecture of the Temple of Love in Versailles and a sculpture of the female nude from the Luxembourg Gardens with a photograph he took of a Black female dancer while on the set of the MC Hammer video for “Straight to My Feet.” Elsewhere, he shows this busy neoclassical European architecture alongside the serene Atlantic ocean, and celebrities he photographed during his time as a professional photographer in the music world, like Iggy Pop, with other images from his archive, like of the forests of Ghana. So Gray combines seemingly disparate things with each other. Why?
the hidden order of the whole © Todd Gray
In doing so, Gray achieves a second kind of proximity, a conceptual proximity, as we begin to relate these things––now ideas––to each other, generating and discerning similarity and difference between them: between European palaces and African landscapes, the static and idealised female nude in the Western art historical canon and the expressive Black female body in motion. For this reason, each of Gray’s works in the hidden order of the whole as a site of proximity is equally one of crisis, creating tension within itself by virtue of its internal conflict. The result? Gray’s cosmic critique and unravelling of the “hidden order” of colonialism by deconstructing and dissecting it into smaller visual parts––into ‘pebbles’.
the hidden order of the whole © Todd Gray
Does this sound like calculus? Admittedly, that might be a stretch. At any rate, you can’t title something “the hidden order of the whole,” or simply talk in the language of parts and wholes, without thinking of something so fundamentally constructive and deconstructive as calculus. At the very least, Gray’s work in the hidden order of the whole certainly resembles some type of visual mathematics that synthesises the thematic whole of colonialism in portions. It isn’t still but dynamic, inquisitive, and growing such that it is useful and beautiful to us in understanding and evolving our perceptions about the history of this world even better than a single photograph, in the same way calculus understands our observable world more intricately and sensitively than geometry.
