Imaging the Unsettling With Arielle Gray
Episode 63 | 2m 30sVideo has Closed Captions
Photographer Arielle Gray is interested in imaging the world to find truth in the eerie.
Arielle Weenonia Gray uses photography as a vehicle to tell stories about challenging perspectives, family, and Southern experience. Gray credits much of her inspiration to the female role models in her life. Her photos often aim to capture the resilience of Southern Black women though the everyday expression of those she loves most, including her twin sister, mother, and late grandmother.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Arts Break is a local public television program presented by WNPT
Support provided by:
Imaging the Unsettling With Arielle Gray
Episode 63 | 2m 30sVideo has Closed Captions
Arielle Weenonia Gray uses photography as a vehicle to tell stories about challenging perspectives, family, and Southern experience. Gray credits much of her inspiration to the female role models in her life. Her photos often aim to capture the resilience of Southern Black women though the everyday expression of those she loves most, including her twin sister, mother, and late grandmother.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch Arts Break
Arts Break is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- Our mom used to dress us up for a lot for photo shoots around the house.
She didn't expect to have two twins, two twin girls.
She loved getting us ready.
She loved styling us like we were, like these two toddler sized dolls, which sounds creepy, but it was adorable.
She would buy disposable cameras and she would pose us around the house.
Her and her using the camera to bond with us is sort of where I started.
Hi, I am Ariel Winona Gray and I'm a photographer from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
I think about storytelling immediately 'cause that is sort of like our gift as people is to tell these stories and to be together.
And my family, they've been the most immediate direct line to imaging myself in the ways that I've wanted to see myself.
At first, it started out as just everyday pictures of just anything and everything around them.
And then eventually I started to have my own questions about what does it look like when my mother is resting?
What does it look like when my grandmother plays dress up with me?
- There's just so much power and beauty and attention to like what she does.
Like you don't realize how wonderful a gift you have in your life and, and then other people are like noticing it.
And I just really like that for her.
It's hard to share it, I guess, but I'll allow it.
- There are images that I've made that I've looked at and loved and or hated, and then I put the on somebody else's eyes and they're like, actually, it's a little unsettling.
And I'm like, how?
Work through it and then step back.
But you can only do that with like other eyes, with you, you know?
And those people are gonna be like, that boat is kind of creepy.
There's been moments in my life where I've found comfort in things that are a little eerie because those things are being truthful in a way, and it's really our perception of those things that makes them scary.
Part of why people feel fear is because they don't understand it.
That's what I'm inspired to do in my images, you know, is to understand that unsettling feeling and to bring light to it.
- Arts and Music
Innovative musicians from every genre perform live in the longest-running music series.
Support for PBS provided by:
Arts Break is a local public television program presented by WNPT