DATEAGLE ART presents their new show Dark Air, a solo exhibition by Gray Wielebinski. By disrupting and distorting classical mythologies, it raises probing questions around gender and identity.
Dark Air will take place at SEAGER Gallery in Deptford, guest curated by Martin Mayorga and Vanessa Murrell of DATEAGLE ART. It runs for three weeks only (12th July – 2nd August 2019). The show forms part of the artist’s ongoing exploration of the myth-making that underpins gender, identity and ritual through the the lenses of Akkadian mythology, sporting ceremonies and reimagined iconographies.
Dark Air, a solo show by Gray Wielebinski curated by Martin Mayorga and Vanessa Murrell at SEAGER Gallery. Courtesy of DATEAGLE ART 2019
Interestingly, I have previously noted the use and appropriation of myths by Alexi Marshall. The exhibition at DATEAGLE, which explores sexuality under a similar light, is centred on an installation piece created by of one of Marshall’s fellow alumni from the Slade School of Fine Art.
In this exhibition, Wielebinski has produced a soft sculpture that stitches together two gatekeepers of mythological lore – the Sphinx and Scorpion. The malleable concoctions results into a grotesque guardian in which genders and myths collide.
Dark Air, a solo show by Gray Wielebinski curated by Martin Mayorga and Vanessa Murrell at SEAGER Gallery. Courtesy of DATEAGLE ART 2019
The two mythological personae have a particular resonance here. The Sphinx, majestic and elegant but contemporaneously malign and merciless, lead the king Oedipus to ruin. The Scorpion, small and insidious, kills with just a drop of venom from his tail, and stealthily took over the previously invincible Orion.
Dark Air, a solo show by Gray Wielebinski curated by Martin Mayorga and Vanessa Murrell at SEAGER Gallery. Courtesy of DATEAGLE ART 2019
Both figures share a duality of meaning; both contruct their identity by depriving others of theirs one. The two, moreover, live in the arid desert: a blank landscape where definitions are easily lost. Even more so in Wielebinski’s constructions, balanced between a soft elegance and a gruesome monstrosity. Body and identity are here displayed as inescapably fragmentary. They are in a constant process of making, destabilizing and re-making. This leaves no space for academic strict binaries, and celebrates, rather, a multiplicity of open-ended possibilities.
In Hook, red, lucid latex, often associated with femininity and, more specifically, with feminine stereotypes such as the femme fatale, is here combined with a bestial claw. To make the image even more disturbing, but thereby more open to interpretation and projection, this adult archetype is juxtaposed by a soft, toy-like stuffed face, most readily connected to the world of children.
This is not the first time that Wielebinski engages with soft sculpture. Previously the artist indeed conjoined together different pieces of dysfunctional, spongy shapes. These defy ancient categories and categorization on multiple levels– from their semi-anthropomorphic, semi-mechanic shape; to their un-gendered identity and unconventional position and material.
Dark Air, a solo show by Gray Wielebinski curated by Martin Mayorga and Vanessa Murrell at SEAGER Gallery. Courtesy of DATEAGLE ART 2019
Wielebinski also refuses personal gender binaries. This is reflected in their oeuvre, which spans across various mediums to explore themes ranging from spectacle, ceremony and national identity, to gender, race and the socialised body.
An essay written by Cairo Clarke will accompany the exhibition. A series of events will be also part of it, including:
– Friday 19th July at 20:00 pm: Screening & Conversation with the artist and OOF Magazine – a biannual print magazine centred on the intersection between football and art, published by Eddy Frankel (Time Out’s Visual Arts Editor), Justin and Jennie Hammond (co-director of J Hammond Projects, and founder of the Catlin Art Prize)
– Saturday 27th July at 12:00 pm: Off-site Pottery Workshop at Proudick (43 Madron Street, London, SE17 2LE), offering the opportunity to respond to the exhibition creatively and tactically by creating a mythological figure. Reservation needed.
– Friday 2nd August at 20:00 pm: Panel Discussion with the artist and Ashleigh Kane, Dazed’s Arts & Culture Editor
SEAGER Gallery, Distillery Tower, 2 Mill Lane, London, SE8 4HP, (Deptford) by DATEAGLE art
12th July – 2nd August 2019; opening night: Friday 12th July, 6-9pm
