-
IN FOCUS: GRAY WIELEBINSKI
-
Hales is delighted to present IN FOCUS: Gray Wielebinski, which gives an overview of the artist's expansive practice and showcases never-before-seen video and collage works. Later this year, the gallery will host a solo show of Wielebinski’s work in London.
Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991 Dallas, TX, USA) incorporates video, performance, installation, sculpture, collage and more, to explore the intersections of mythology, identity, gender, nationhood, and memory. Reconfiguring and transforming iconography and visual codes, their work seeks to navigate and question society’s frameworks and belief systems. They live and work in both London, UK and Los Angeles, CA, USA.
-
Gray Wielebinski. Photograph by Ian Byers Gamber.
Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991 Dallas, TX, USA) received a BA from Pomona College, Claremont CA, USA in 2014 before completing an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2018.
Wielebinski has exhibited internationally and their work has been written about extensively, most notably in Art Maze, It’s Nice That, Dazed, Time Out London, AQNB and Hammer Museum Graphite Magazine. Wielebinski’ work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, USA and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library & Archives, CA, USA.
-
‘Ultimately my practice becomes a way to engage directly with the realities and contexts in which we live while at the same time imagining and proposing alternatives – even if it’s just in our imaginations.’
-
Mythology weaves a strong thread throughout Wielebinski’s works, they draw on both ancient and contemporary myths that exist in our daily lives. Their interest in myth making stemmed from an upbringing in Dallas, Texas, which created a deep fascination with Americana, particularly the narratives that surround cowboys and sports. Wielebinski notes that Texas has a potent mythologizing of itself and a specific history and culture. They then moved to Los Angeles, California which has its own relationship to fantasy and myth making via Hollywood.
Repurposing their personal collection of baseball cards, Wielebinski transforms these emblems of a typically ‘American’ sport into a new collector’s item – an artwork. Keeping the scale of the original cards brings an intimacy, inviting the viewer to look closely and deconstruct their relationship to the familiar object. Leather, fur, threads and nail polish are accrued on the works surface – using textiles and sewn decorative elements Wielebinski references craft and traditionally feminine modes of making layered onto sportsman’s bodies.
-
‘Collage has always been integral to my practice because of its potential to subvert or recreate contexts and meanings.’
-
The process of collaging runs through their practice in many forms – there is a constant layering of imagery, materiality and concept, to create works in textile, sculpture and on paper. An avid collector, Wielebinski’s source material comes from their vast archive which has developed from a childhood of collecting baseball cards.
In collages made this year, Wielebinski puts together new forms and ways of embodiment, questioning what makes a body more than the sum of its parts. They dissect figures, directly challenging our obsession with ‘reading’ bodies – in their intuitive combination of body parts, they make new creatures. They combine symbolically masculine and Americana imagery with classical antiquity to form dichotomous heroic and monstrous figures. Partially obscured by textiles and sewn decorative elements Wielebinski references craft and traditionally perceived as feminine modes of making. Wielebinski creates a world that rejects the duality of feminine and masculine, before and after, for an inclusive utopia where multiple identities can exist.
-
‘With these creatures, in some ways, I was finding solace in making these new ways of representing a body. I was consciously and subconsciously drawing attention to our obsession with ‘reading’ bodies. My process of putting together new forms and new ways of embodiment directly challenges that idea and draws into question what it is that makes a body, more than the sum of its parts.’
-
In Wielebinski’s soft sculptures they collage textiles, working with materials that already hold specific cultural and iconographical meaning, as well as referencing the individuals who previously wore them. Wielebinski draws our attention to the importance of clothes in shaping identity and the personal meaning that is imposed onto them. Wielebinski combines and recontextualises these references into new forms – hand-stitched stuffed creatures reminiscent of childhood toys. Patchworked from jean, fur, leather, bandanas, and snakeskin, the soft sculptures have a Frankenstein quality to them. Beloved by their creator, the works oscillate between the grotesque, cute, fetish, anthropomorphic, beastly and human. In a world that villainises non-conforming identities, Wielebinski sensitively offers an alternative, where the potentials of what gender can be is explored.
-
‘MYTHS PAST AND PRESENT CAN TELL US A LOT ABOUT POWER AND WHO IS ABLE TO CRAFT AND RETELL NARRATIVES. SO, I THINK IT’S SUPREMELY RELEVANT AND NECESSARY TO REVISIT AND INTERROGATE THEM AND MAKE OUR OWN.’
-
The Sphinx-Scorpion (2019) is a large-scale soft sculpture which was created for Wielebinski’s solo exhibition, Dark Air at Seager Gallery in 2019, curated by DATEAGLE ART. Here, Wielebinski creates a hybrid of the sphinx and the scorpion, two individual animals stitched together to create a sprawling new body.
-
Images: The Sphinx-Scorpion, 2019, Patchwork textiles. Installation view Dark Air, 12 July – 2 August 2019, Seager Gallery, London, UK.
Drawing on mythology surrounding the respective creatures, they are entwined in roles of guardianship. The Scorpios myth details that the scorpion is immortalised by Zeus when it kills Orion for attempting to kill every beast on earth. As well as myths of aqrabuamelu and girtablilu which are “Scorpion Men” that guard the passage of the sun. The scorpion also has connotations of the “Wild West,” cowboy narratives and the “untamed” frontiers. The Sphinx appears in many iterations throughout mythologies as a “threshold” figure that guards tombs or monuments. The Sphinx famously guarded the city of Thebes with an impossible riddle, which when is solved by Oedipus, she threw herself to death.
For The Sphinx-Scorpion Wielebinski was thinking about mythologies as the stories that make up who we are, specifically in relation to transness in the “before and after” stories. Occupying the space in between, the making of the sculpture became a very personal experience and one that was both cathartic and labour intensive. Wielebinski creates an amalgamation of bodies in one imposing stuffed animal which has a plurality of identities. They reconfigure the narrative, proposing that the scorpion is misunderstood, only attacking when provoked and that the sphinx is not trying to deceive.
-
‘In a broader way, myths and myth-making are essentially the stories and shared beliefs through which a society or culture creates its realities, parameters, and belief systems.’
-
'In many ways, particularly in the US, the world of sports has been and continues to be hugely political and seeps into our lives on an almost daily basis, much broader and more accessibly than, for example, contemporary art.'
-
Gray WielebinskiLast Year's Class, 2021Single channel video with sound3m 50s
-
ARTIST NEWS & PRESS
