Is a photograph unquestionably true?

“Everyone is part of the story,” says artist Todd Gray about “Ghosts in the Machine,” a new mural installed by Murals of La Jolla as Gray’s attempt to create out of a loss of control and to reframe the photograph as a question rather than a statement. 

“Ghosts in the Machine,” now displayed at the back of 1111 Prospect St., is a set of distorted images connected by similar circumstances. 

Some are from 2007, when Gray shot digital photographs of the landscape around his beachfront studio in Akwidaa, Ghana. A malfunctioning memory card in the camera corrupted the photos.

In 2020, Gray, also based in Los Angeles, photographed classic sculptures in the gardens at The Huntington in San Marino, Ca. These images were also glitched, rendering similar distortions.

Supporters of Murals of La Jolla, a project of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, received a peek at a rendering of Gray’s mural a week ago at a party during which the artist spoke about the images. 

In an earlier interview with lajolla.ca, Gray expressed hope that “Ghosts in the Machine” would pique viewers’ curiosity, “because it is such a colorful work and it’s a fairly complex collage.”

The complexity arose from the glitches reminding Gray there are “things that are outside of my control,” he said. “As we become so dependent on technology, we see these schisms that occur, we see these unforeseen outcomes that come about, because at times, technology has its own direction that it’s going to go in.”

Gray is not speaking about artificial intelligence, he emphasized. “This is just the odd mishaps that occur in super complex systems.”

“We take the photograph as a statement of fact, because it records a moment in time,” said Gray, a former professor of photography at Art Center College of Design, UC Los Angeles and other institutions.

“Ghosts in the Machine,” then, is “about destabilizing the idea of the veracity of photography,” he said, as “this digital photograph now can be manipulated to such a point that we can no longer rely on the fact of the image.”

This intricacy leads the viewer to be “conscious that they are actually creating the meaning of the photograph,” Gray said. “Viewers are part of the equation.”

The mural itself is “pretty joyful because the colors are so saturated,” he said. As viewers look closer,  “they may see signs of the past … [and] go off connecting their own dots from there.”

Visualizing the past within the aberrated images speaks to Gray’s “own passage to America,” he said, while also indicating to others that “everybody came over here on a boat. We’re all immigrants. That’s the commonality.”

The hyper amplification of colors is also meant to evoke the Anthropocene Epoch, Gray said, an unofficial unit of geologic time meaning when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate.

“Ghosts in the Machine” fits well at the location, and within the Murals of La Jolla catalog, as its scale, colors and “compelling subject matter [result] in a truly compelling mural,” said Taylor Chapin, curatorial associate for the program.

“The interplay and flow between abstraction and representation” drew Chapin in, she said. “I was also struck by how seamlessly he weaves together material photographed during two different points in his career.”

Artist Todd Gray

A public art program like Murals of La Jolla, during which people “ stumble upon art in unexpected places” is “really wonderful,” Gray said, noting the integration of art into daily lives is “a really rich experience.”

© lajolla.ca