Gray Wielebinski’s First and Last

12/11/23 0 min read Words: Gray Wielebinski

What’s on your camera roll? It’s a question to make even the exhibitionists among us squirm. In this series, we ask brave participants to tell us about the first and last photos on their phones. Next up, it’s artist Gray Wielebinski

I first worked with Gray on a group exhibition titled Meltdown at Ridley Road Project Space in 2021. Including over 60 artists, it was the last curatorial hurrah in a studio building soon to be repurposed by the council. We invited artists to submit an offering that formed a ‘larger political expression of survival and transformation in the face of a lack of affordable space for artists’. Gray’s contribution? A T-shirt to be posted to us from the USA reading ‘Artist Slain’ and designed to be biblically chained to the wall. Good, right?

Fast forward two years and I speak to Gray in the midst of a milestone solo exhibition at London’s ICA, where a retrofuturistic conversation pit and a dimly-lit bunker are watched over by a basketball court scoreboard that references the artist’s upbringing in Dallas.

First: ‘Knock Knock 911’ from Lisa Auerbach’s ‘Sweaters and Skirts’ series

The first photo from my camera roll says it’s from 17th February 2009. It’s a photo of one of Lisa Auerbach’s ‘Sweaters and Skirts’ series; this one parodies and interrogates the US discourse around 9/11. The series blends humour, fashion, politics, gender and identity. This piece in particular feels ominously prescient, amid the huge revitalisation of war on terror discourse. Lisa was one of my undergraduate art professors at Pomona College in Southern California. She and my other professors, particularly Mark Allen and Mercedes Teixido, supported me enormously in becoming an artist, helping me begin to see what that could even mean. We’re all still good friends today.

A knitted skirt and jumper set from Lisa Auerbach's 'Sweaters and Skirts' series. The text on the jumper reads 'Knock knock. Who's there? 9-11. 9-11 who?'

Knock Knock 911, 2007, from Lisa Auerbach’s ‘Sweaters and Skirts’ series

Last: Asa Seresin and Billy Lobos at the London Edition Hotel

The last picture in my camera roll is a photo of Asa Seresin and Billy Lobos at Dilara Fındıkoğlu’s ‘Dark Versailles’ themed party at the London Edition Hotel. Asa is my boyfriend, and I met Billy for the first time a couple of months ago when he styled a shoot I did for Buffalo Zine. Joseph Echenique shot the images in The Excalibur Estate in Catford – it was one of my favourite shoots. It was boiling hot that day and they kept greasing me up in olive oil, but it was fun to submit to their vision and play around, as I was very stressed about starting the installation of my solo show at the ICA!