Gray Wielebinski: The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low | Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Hales is delighted to announce that Gray Wielebinski's first solo institutional exhibition, The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low, is now open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. 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 Red Sun is High, the Blue Low transforms the ICA into an investigation of constructed worlds within worlds. In doing so, Wielebinski responds to our neighbours on The Mall: Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Park, and the Admiralty Citadel. The exhibition’s title 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.’

In Wielebinski’s installation environment, overlapping worlds feel both familiar and strange. A large electronic basketball scoreboard signals to visitors their unknown role in some mysterious, surely unwinnable, game. The sun appears in multiple and sequential instances across the space, mapping a potential collapse of temporalities. Now a dark, absurdist bunker, the ICA’s smaller reading room stands in contrast to the light-filled gallery 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 where separating oneself leads towards community formation rather than isolation.
 
 
Gray Wielebinski
The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low
The Institute of Contemporary Art
The Mall, St. James's
London
SW1Y 5AH
 
September 20, 2023