Todd Gray: Pop Geometry

We live in a recombinant culture of rampant availability, where information is shared, transmogrified, and reconstituted into new forms. The Internet and social media have given this process an undeniable energy and momentum. The remix and the mash-up, two very concentrated forms of melding content from different sources, have transformed popular music and the visual arts in powerful and unexpected ways.

Todd Gray’s painted sculptures have a distinct currency and impact when regarded in this contemporary context. His Pop Geometry series encompasses a range of eight sub-groups, but they all have in common imagery from classic American pop art, comic book exclamations POW! and ZAP!, emojis, and hashtags. The sculptures, made of wood boxes that have been painted on their exposed surfaces, have a dynamic kick with bold colors, animated patterns, and diverse fonts.

In Gray’s work there is a feeling of simultaneity, with a wide range of visual elements all competing for our attention. In its raucous insistence, the sculptures’ messaging suggests our digital life – complex, hyped-up, and always on. All the planes of Gray’s boxes have a black border with rounded corners, which both creates a coloristic intensity and the sense that we are looking at many electronic screens, each activated with its own display.

Whatever the arrangement, Gray visually quotes from the paintings of famous pop artists – Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book women, Robert Indiana’s LOVE – as well as Victor Vasarely’s op art patterns. By appropriating their imagery, Gray is reprising what the original pop artists did in their own work: sampling images from the media world around them, celebrating and questioning these icons, and then remixing them into something personal and new.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website