The Shape of What You Lived

Todd Gray’s photosculptures interrogate the long reach of colonization and its intersection with the built environment, the natural world, and other manifestations of historical and contemporary culture. Drawing from his extensive archive of original photographs—taken over the course of five decades—Gray composes syncopated arrangements that speak in equal measure to rapturous beauty and devastating critique. With an incisive eye for detail, Gray builds visual and intellectual connections between African landscapes and Renaissance interiors, pop icons and sculptural monuments, classical order and the digital glitch, reorienting our received notions about how to see the world. A precocious teenager, Gray got his start as a music photographer, touring with the Rolling Stones before graduating from high school. After choosing to attend CalArts during the school’s heyday as a center of conceptual art, Gray maintained a successful commercial practice, shooting hundreds of iconic album covers and magazine assignments. A return to CalArts for graduate studies during the late 80s marked an important shift in his work, infusing his already-rigorous conceptual and technical practice with a deep engagement with post-colonial theory. As a result of his multifaceted background as a photographer, sculptor, performer, and educator, Gray has developed a compelling visual vocabulary, using images in powerful combinations that speak to the eye, mind, and body. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gray now lives between Los Angeles and Akwidaa, Ghana.

Hayv Kahraman (born 1981, Baghdad), Iraqi-American contemporary artist, based in Los Angeles, works primarily in painting and drawing, her art addresses displacement, gender, identity, war and migration, drawing from Middle Eastern art history, mythology and personal experience, blending traditional aesthetics with contemporary political narratives.

Kevin Umaña (b. 1989) grew up in El Salvador and Los Angeles. He earned his BFA from San Francisco State University in 2014 and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Initially focused on geometric painting, his practice has expanded to ceramics. His recent “hybrid paintings”—glazed ceramics on painted canvas—explore the history of the Pipil people, Indigenous to western and central El Salvador, where his family originates. These works blend conflicting styles: biomorphic and geometric, matte and sheen, order and mess. They evoke childhood memories—landscapes, beaches, plants, building materials, food, and religion.