Frame 61November 03, 2022

Gray Wielebinski

Frame 61November 03, 2022

“My work often touches on gender and transition, and there is obviously a cultural association of thinking about the trans body as monstrous.”

Mythology plays a crucial role in your work — referenced, at times, through historical and more “traditional” examples of mythic tales and ancient symbolism. However, a more pertinent subject is contemporary forms of mythology: how our understanding of place and self is produced and reproduced through the myths that society propagates about gender, power, identity and so on. What do you hope to explore through this focus on mythology in your work?

A lot of my interest in mythology stems from growing up in the US and in Texas in particular. The formation of American national identity is so full of myth-making in a very active role, but the artificiality and fragility of these myths are also very evident, in part because the country is so young and because it was forged out of a very intense foundational violence. I am invested in retelling myths in a way that exposes this artificiality and fragility without rejecting the role of myth altogether.

An itinerant motif in your work, at times complementing this exploration of mythology, is the “monstrous” — anthropomorphic figures or human torsos stitched together like Frankenstein dolls, glass casts of growling orge-like faces, or mixed-media collages that explicitly reference supernatural and horror iconography from the ’80s and ’90s. What is it about this aesthetic that interests you, and in what ways do you mobilise this in your practice?

Part of my interest in the monstrous comes from the desire I just mentioned to locate that which is demonized inside the norm, and think about how representations of triumph and perfection always contain their opposite. It also goes back to the centrality of collage in my practice. The technique of collage is inseparable from monstrosity, but this connection also neutralizes monstrosity in a way, so that it isn’t necessarily a harbinger of immorality or evil but instead just a way of describing unexpected things being joined together. My work often touches on gender and transition, and there is obviously a cultural association of thinking about the trans body as monstrous. Again, thinking about monstrosity in terms of collage gives us a way to think about this association in a new light. It isn’t about condemning the trans body as repellent but instead thinking about how transness is part of a broader tradition of remaking the body, creating something new out of existing material.

You’ve previously described yourself as a “media-obsessed kid” and I think this proves in the pop cultural references that punctuate your work, from baseball cards and scarves to the aforementioned rodeo bull and horror tropes. Beyond these references, who are your key heroes and heroines across the arts?

That’s funny, yes it’s true! And part of that territory is a kind of constant consumption so it’s fun to think about how my answer would vary a lot depending on when you asked me and who and what I was really obsessed with or fixated on at that time. I think part of what can be so overwhelming and endlessly fascinating about experiencing someone else’s art is this insight into not only how someone else’s brain works and metabolizes and aestheticzes information, but an insight into their whole life up to that point including their own relationships to other forms of art and influences and experiences.

When it’s my own work I sometimes fall prey to feeling like I know every step of how got there and it can feel like it’s lacking that sense of mystery or that ineffable quality that makes a piece puncture you, but it’s nice to remind myself that we’re always also sharing ourselves when we show our work, and so much from that point is out of our control. This is a long-winded way of looking at and pointing out why this is a fun question which is just that you can read the artist’s statement or even chat with the artist about the work but we don’t always have the space to also talk about so many other influences or things we like and see and metabolize, consciously or not, that are also going into so many decisions that lead to the final outcome. I’ll just give one recent media obsession that also did play a role on many levels on Pain and Glory (including the title!) is Pedro Almodovar. I happened to have been having a marathon of his entire filmography throughout almost the entire duration we were producing the work. His work does such a beautiful and singular job of delicately (and sometimes indelicately) balancing so many different tones and shifts in perspectives and paying attention to seemingly opposing themes and tensions, from sexuality and violence to gender dynamics, power, freedom, and fascism, national and individual identity, childhood, memory, etc. We explore a lot of similar themes in very different ways and I found it really nourishing on many levels.

Your first public sculpture commission, Pain and Glory, was on show at Bold Tendencies in London this year. It is an ambitious new piece, deeply original in its design but also filled with conceptual nuances. Can you briefly describe the physical work and some of the ideas that went into the piece?

The work takes the form of a fully operational mechanical bull encased in a tall, ornamented fence; I also commissioned audio tracks from two producers, TWEAKS and SONIKKU, which play somewhat faintly in the background. Viewers ride the bull, but the role of the spectators watching from the outside is equally (if not more) important. The fence is adorned with panels made to resemble stained glass, glory holes, butt plugs, and spurs. In developing this piece I was interested in public intimacy and the kinds of subterranean spaces like gay bars and cruising spots whose existence is so fragile in our contemporary moment. The depiction and anthropomorphization of animals is a recurrent theme in my work. With the bull, I was thinking about how there is always an impulse to dominate within love and intimacy, but that this impulse is always doomed to failure. The vulnerability and isolation of riding the bull while others watch you is a representation of this phenomenon. Once the piece opened and I got to see the public interact with it, I became interested in how the experience of riding the bull and the experience of watching from the outside is so dissimilar – it’s almost like, when you’re riding, you’re in a pocket of space and time that works differently from the outside.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day/studio routine? What is your studio like?

Depending on what type of work I’m doing I’ll either work from home or at my studio. I just moved to a new studio recently so lately it’s been relatively organized and tidy in there but not sure how long that will last. I’m quite messy and like to collect a lot of different potential materials and objects and so if I’m not careful it can get out of control pretty easily. The flip side is it also feels reassuring to be surrounded by things that make me feel overwhelmed and excited to make things so it can be a good reminder of why I do what I do and how fortunate I am in that regard.

*Pain and Glory, Bold Tendencies 2022. Photography by Deniz Guzel*

*Pumping, 2021, Photo by Damian Griffiths*

The relationship between public and private worlds is seen elsewhere in your work. For instance, your recent piece for Testament at Goldsmiths CCA in London. The work is described as “an archive of the notion of rumour” and features two engraved copper plates that on the one hand shows a sequence of poetic text, and on the other, an abstracted image. Could you tell us more about this piece and its relationship to this dynamic?

The piece began as an exploration of the mechanics of the “open secret.” Working in collaboration with the writer Asa Seresin, I was thinking about how information can be held in common but still be covert or hidden – in this sense, it is very similar to the underground, semipublic spaces I invoke in Pain and Glory. We were interested in the process by which common knowledge gets transformed into scandal. Testament was about public monuments, and our piece was a kind of paradox because it was a physical monumentalization of something that is by nature ephemeral. I invoked this tension through the copper plates, which in the past were used for newspaper printing. For a brief moment, the news (and gossip) of the day took on this fairly concrete form, rendered in copper – but after the printing process was over the plates were melted down for reuse, which is such a fascinating encapsulation of the shifting, elusive archive of rumor.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I have several shows in the United States and in Europe that I’m at the beginning stages of planning and am very much looking forward to expanding on some existing themes and new ideas. Most recently now coming up for the rest of this year/early next year I’ll be working with Bold Tendencies again on another public sculpture commission with Selfridges which will open early next year which will be an exciting challenge.

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All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 03/11/22

Frame 61