LONDON.- ICA London is presenting the first solo institutional exhibition of cross-disciplinary artist Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991 Dallas, TX, USA; based in London and L.A.). The exhibition features all new site-specific work across painting, sculpture, installation and sound addressing the complex state of individual agency today, specifically, anxieties underpinning apocalypticism, simulation and the systems that mediate our behaviour.

Expanding Wielebinski’s exploration of the boundaries of private and public spaces, with references spanning sci-fi, Cold War legacies and games, the exhibition transforms the ICA into an investigation of constructed worlds within worlds. In doing so, Wielebinski responds to the ICA neighbours on The Mall: Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Park, and the Admiralty Citadel.

The exhibition’s title, The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low, is taken from a 1978 essay by science fiction writer and critic Samuel R. Delany. Delany uses the sentence as an example of the corrective and revisionary process of reading science fiction, in which ‘each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before.’ The title functions as a fitting analogy for Wielebinski’s installation environment in which overlapping worlds feel both familiar and strange. The ICA’s Lower Gallery and Reading Room contain various sculptural and readymade objects, paintings, audio and architectural elements, each of which solicits — through direct interaction or quiet imposition — our individual responses and our collective behaviour.

Continuing the artist’s interest in sports iconography and the vernaculars of a waning American empire, a large electronic basketball scoreboard presides over the space. Its menacing and playful presence signals to visitors their unknown role in some mysterious, surely unwinnable, game. Circular seating, part 1970s conversation pit, part war room, likewise inveigles our physical participation. The motif of the sun appears in multiple and sequential instances, mapping a collapse of temporalities. We are suspended between a past, present and future in which the sun is a symbol of both apocalypse (nuclear or environmental, you pick) and a glorious life force. A sense of looming threat is pervasive, but we can’t know if it is simulation, false alarm or even a joke. Comfort and cruelty, humour and doom, surveillance and spectatorship weave through the work in such a way that contradiction becomes obsolete.

The main gallery space is set in relation to the ICA’s smaller reading room, here transformed by Wielebinski into an absurdist bunker, a physical embodiment of the mindset of a doomsday prepper. This dark, quiet space stands in stark contrast to the light-filled gallery, which is visible to those who place their eye on the aperture of a telescoping peephole connecting the two spaces. In its privacy, surveillance, and exclusivity, the bunker also speaks the language of illicit spaces—another kind of world within a world — where separating oneself leads towards community formation rather than isolation. We are asked to recognise those worlds we solicit and those that are thrust upon us, parsing our agency in the process.

Wielebinski’s commission could be viewed as a processing of terminal capitalism and the omnipresence of a collective low-grade anxiety. In the wake of a pandemic that forced the tilling of our social ground, exposing our governing systems and conventions to scrutiny they could not withstand, this exhibition imagines how we might position our individual and public selves anew. And with it comes an unexpected playfulness and optimism, the ineffable condition of living in a time in which apocalyptic precarity feels realistic and maybe also revelatory.

The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low is accompanied by a full event programme and small publication. The artist and new collaborators will be activating the space throughout the run of the exhibition. In conjunction with The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low, Wielebinski will take over the Selfridges’ Orchard Street Windows from September to November 2023. Further, the new commission Exhibition by Wielebinski is currently on display at the Selfridges Art Block.

ICA London
The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low
September 20th, 2023 - December 23rd, 2023