Gray Wielebinski:
All Hat, No Cattle![]()
10.24.26 - 12.05.26
︎Checklist
︎Checklist
All Hat, No Cattle explores the process of self-making, performance, and exposure in the setting of Gray Wielebinski’s hometown of Dallas, Texas. In a new series of sculptural assemblages, Wielebinski evokes character types intrinsic to the Texan and American national imagination (the cheerleader; the football player; the devil; the clown), defamiliarizing these archetypes by breaking them down into constitutive parts. These pieces of self draw attention to the artifice of everyday status and performance, of the inevitably doomed task of constructing a coherent identity out of the mess of the internal and external worlds.
Many of the sculptures take hat boxes as their frame, retrograde items that speak to a nearly forgotten world of stiff and elegant propriety. Each sculpture works as a kind of bizarre mini archive, drawing on Wielebinski’s longstanding use of collage to make connections between unexpected entities. The focus on headgear extends to sculptures constructed out of pillbox hats inside helmets, in which the doubled “hat” reveals no true self lying beneath external projection. The archaic flamboyance of the pillbox hat with the rough utilitarianism of a sports helmet merge to create something new entirely. If the hat box assemblages contain the discarded items that make up a sense of personhood, the helmet sculptures come close to existing as Frankensteinish bodies themselves, simultaneously reading as touching, monstrous, and comic.
Included in the exhibition are a series of tapestries constructed out of gun cloth, a reflection of the material history that makes up the American national landscape. Resembling both geographic maps and astral constellations, these invented flags speak to the constructed nature of place, particularly one as relatively new as the city of Dallas. As these works remind us, there are many ways to depict the topography of a city, a state, a country. What might seem stable and objective is in fact the product of a collective fantasy.
The exhibition’s title is a twentieth-century colloquialism denoting bluff and fraudulence, which has come to be particularly associated with Texans. According to its first recorded print appearance in the 1930s Oklahoma press, the phrase originated in indigenous communities, and could thus be read as part of a broader critique of US national mythology. Wielebinski’s artworks explore the ways in which the feeling of fraudulence has become somewhat fundamental to contemporary American existence, as capitalism has dislodged traditional relationships to land and community. While the fear of exposure may be pervasive, Wielebinski explores a concurrent tradition in which artifice is proudly touted. Whether wielded as an accusation or embraced as part of a uniquely Texan way of being, All Hat, No Cattle comes to exemplify the mythologies inherent to Dallas and those who have called it home.
Many of the sculptures take hat boxes as their frame, retrograde items that speak to a nearly forgotten world of stiff and elegant propriety. Each sculpture works as a kind of bizarre mini archive, drawing on Wielebinski’s longstanding use of collage to make connections between unexpected entities. The focus on headgear extends to sculptures constructed out of pillbox hats inside helmets, in which the doubled “hat” reveals no true self lying beneath external projection. The archaic flamboyance of the pillbox hat with the rough utilitarianism of a sports helmet merge to create something new entirely. If the hat box assemblages contain the discarded items that make up a sense of personhood, the helmet sculptures come close to existing as Frankensteinish bodies themselves, simultaneously reading as touching, monstrous, and comic.
Included in the exhibition are a series of tapestries constructed out of gun cloth, a reflection of the material history that makes up the American national landscape. Resembling both geographic maps and astral constellations, these invented flags speak to the constructed nature of place, particularly one as relatively new as the city of Dallas. As these works remind us, there are many ways to depict the topography of a city, a state, a country. What might seem stable and objective is in fact the product of a collective fantasy.
The exhibition’s title is a twentieth-century colloquialism denoting bluff and fraudulence, which has come to be particularly associated with Texans. According to its first recorded print appearance in the 1930s Oklahoma press, the phrase originated in indigenous communities, and could thus be read as part of a broader critique of US national mythology. Wielebinski’s artworks explore the ways in which the feeling of fraudulence has become somewhat fundamental to contemporary American existence, as capitalism has dislodged traditional relationships to land and community. While the fear of exposure may be pervasive, Wielebinski explores a concurrent tradition in which artifice is proudly touted. Whether wielded as an accusation or embraced as part of a uniquely Texan way of being, All Hat, No Cattle comes to exemplify the mythologies inherent to Dallas and those who have called it home.