Bring Me Men is a solo exhibition by London-based American artist Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991, Dallas, TX). Examining the cultural scripts and contradictions through which masculinity is produced, performed, and contested, the exhibition is titled after a phrase that was historically displayed on the façade of the United States Air Force Academy until its removal in 2003. At NıCOLETTı, Wielebinski uses this slogan to prompt a series of questions that run throughout the exhibition: who is a man, who becomes one, and under what conditions?
These themes are addressed through a series of new sculptural assemblages made of collected materials such as boxes, shopping bags, athletic accessories, rulers, leather gloves, and fragments of printed matter. Recalling decorated bedrooms and school lockers, Wielebinski’s works evoke the formative spaces of adolescence, where identity emerges through a charged mixture of desire, social bonds, and prohibitions around queer intimacy. Taken together, these pieces create the silhouette of a collector, someone whose identity is formed through accumulation, concealment, and display.
Listed among the works’ materials are highly personal possessions: the books Wielebinski has been reading, and the keys to his apartment, for instance. Through these gestures unfolds a sense of yearning – a bid for connection – even as many items are hidden, sealed off, or squirrelled away. The sculptural assemblages are accompanied by two-dimensional collages exploring idealised depictions of white American masculinity, including Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bags – a recurring motif in Wielebinski’s work – which are deconstructed to become camp, quasi-religious icons hung within custom cross-shaped frames.
Bring Me Men is guided by a kind of horizontal worship, a manic interest in everything, a strategy of assemblage that seeks and produces meaning through the association of a priori disparate materials and references. Together, Wielebinski’s works ask how masculinity – often defined by distance and control – might be reconsidered at an unexpectedly intimate scale.
