In the 1970s, when late modernist monuments dominated sculpture, Joel Shapiro caused a hullabaloo when he presented his eccentric miniature work on the floor of Paula Cooper’s Gallery. Spectators came upon a selection of three-inch-high bronze or cast-iron objects—a chair, a dollhouse, a bird and even a coffin. New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center director and curator, Tom Finkelpearl stated, “Shapiro is the patron saint of the small… He is the anti-Oldenburg, taking big things and making them little.”[1]  Again the power of the tiny is eminent in Seattle-born and New York-based artist, Charles LeDray ’s retrospective exhibition, CHARLES LEDRAY: workworkworkworkwork. One must be willing to slow down to appreciate this artist’s presentation of intriguing miniature everyday objects. Organized by Associate Curator Randi Hopkins, at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, this show surveys 25 years of the artist’s work. The world LeDray presents is one of the small, the quaint, the curious—a far cry from today’s realm of the immediate, splash, bam and boom! Throughout his work he presents open-ended mini narratives inspired from childhood memories, folk traditions and tacky Americana. Fine Arts Magazine

In our Post-Art Production age, the majority of artists do not equate art making with the making of objects. Instead they value concept over matter such as the production of artists’ video, artists-books, performance, site works, and art made for distribution on CD-ROM and the World Wide Web. In such an artistic culture, Charles LeDray’s art is an unexpected anomaly!

The exhibition consists of approximately 30 sculptures and installations, including significant early pieces fabricated by LeDray since 1989, including such initial works as, Untitled/Broken Bear (1993), and a clothing based sculpture, Come Together (1995-1996). As a young artist in 1991, LeDray displayed his objects in tactful arrangements along the sidewalk at New York’s Cooper Square. He joined the group of alternative local community, open-air sales people, enlivening the streets of New York with his unique fabrications. At the ICA, his artwork is again, placed meticulous arrangements. However, here the purposeful, persnickety placement of the objects is interrupted arbitrarily by the appearance of each ingenious item.

For example, in the ambitious installation titled, MENS SUITS (2006-2010), he employs his earlier method of setting work out at floor level, perhaps in defiance of the iconographic message of authority that a man’s suit would ordinarily project. In another recent work, premiered at this exhibit, Throwing Shadows (2008-2010) is an unusual ceramic installation comprised of more than 3,000 tiny black porcelain pots, standing like silent sentinels and casting shadows on a flat, characterless surface. The delicateness of each vessel evokes both a sense of vulnerability and authority, challenging a viewer’s perception of the power of simple forms in space.

LeDray is a rare artist, obsessed with handmade artistry. The intricate detail of his painstakingly fabricated smaller-than-life objects often takes years to complete. Clothing is a dominant theme throughout his oeuvre, serving as a substitute for human, predominantly male, identity. His sculptural clothing is not inspired by high fashion and its ability to communicate power, wealth or beauty. Instead artistic motivation is drawn from the milieu of labor and everyday occupations. He expands the definition of sculpture through his scrupulously fashioned formal suits, stitched patches, assorted ties, shirts, overcoats, denim jackets and bizarre hats, as well as undersized chests of drawers, doors and thousands of unique, minuscule vessels. By miniaturizing the familiar, this artist draws a viewer into a comfortable, toy-like world where clothing symbolizes persons and tasks. Entering this magical exhibition, a viewer may feel as though they’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole or stepped into Jonathan’s Swift kingdom of Gulliver’s Travels and the world of the Lilliputians.

The first installation, Village People (2003-2006), at the gallery entrance, sets the stage for this production. In it, identifiable individuals are only alluded to with an assortment of miniature caps, symbolizing the diversity of personalities co-existing within social culture. Spanning an upper wall, a collection of funky hats hang in a horizontal row, further representing different walks of life, professions and interests. One must crane upward to inspect the range of headgear, including a hotdog, cowboy, jester, wizard, cheese-head and ‘Seniors Rule’ cap. The amount of idiosyncratic detail in each undersized hat will amaze!

Charles (1995), perhaps a self-portrait, depicts a child-like outfit of a mechanic’s clothing on a hanger with small items of men patterned shirts and woman’s lingerie sagging out from its ends—this gender mixture of clothing translates into an oddly androgynous, enigmatic piece.

In the wall installation Dispatch (#1) (1992), numerous miniature handmade books are pinned to the white surface, with their pages facedown to expose the front and back binding. The joie de vivre presentation of this piece makes for a beautiful, somewhat tongue-in-cheek work, while the continuous theme of miniaturization gives it an absolute peculiarity.

Gorgeous and intriguing are LeDray ’s painstakingly carved minuscule sculptures that evince a startling visual presence. These pieces call to mind Charles Simonds’s architectural tableaux of invented civilizations –another master of the miniature. Untitled (1999-2000), an intricately stacked vertical assemblage of little furniture, suggests the fragility of a house of cards. These faultless groupings of a step-ladder, a chair, a door and another of a minute model of the solar system compel one to step nearer to examine their details and incredibly smooth white surface. Conversely, when one realizes that these constructions are made of hand-carved human bone, an eerie, macabre alertness pervades, cancelling out their outwardly-cute dollhouse innocence.

Perhaps the most compelling piece in this show (and one of the smallest), is Ring Finger (2004). Despite its petite size, LeDray’s minimal ivory carving of a tiny skeletal human finger threaded through a gold ring, looms large as a haunting reminder of time passing, mortality and the absurdity of materialism.

Oasis (1996-2003), is an early mini-pottery collection. It is displayed in a large, steel-shelving unit containing six glass shelves, filled with two-thousand or more tiny, glazed individually crafted ceramic vessels. Collectively, the varying shapes and carefully-decorated colorful surfaces read as a compressed international history of art pottery, representing such cultures as China, Greece, Korea, Japan and countries throughout Western Europe. The placement of this cabinet in the center of the gallery affords an onlooker the opportunity to walk around the module, indulging in closer scrutiny of the assorted pieces. This earlier collection of ceramics differs from LeDray’s monochromatic black, Throwing Shadows, which asks the viewer to examine the pieces more carefully for the essential differences.

Revisiting the pinnacle of this exhibition and its most noteworthy work, the multifaceted installation, MENS SUITS. Here, one sees three small-scale, complex simulations of second-hand clothing store departments, presented on the floor of a large, dimly-lit gallery space that extends 40 feet. Floating industrial metal resembling a store ceiling hangs suspended over each unique thrift shop tableaux, containing impeccably-rendered garments and paraphernalia, taking on the atmosphere of a second-hand shop. The ceiling’s compact fluorescent lights spotlight each particular pageant inside its distinct platform. While none are present, we can easily imagine cost-conscious customers sifting through these discarded treasures.

This work demonstrates a new expansion of LeDray’s thinking about objects both in size and complexity. Although he continues to pair small things, overflowing with incredible details, in a representational context, we are no longer focusing on a specific object. The viewer must now walk to each separate site inside this three-part narrative if they hope to piece together this puzzling story. No longer is the miniature the dominant element—it is only part of a larger mysterious whole. The observer towers over knee-high sets, filled with racks of men’s shirts, ties, laundry bins, garbage bags and stacked plastic hangers. There is a sense of time past, evident not only by the tattered appearance of the clothing, but also is accented by the intended presence of accumulated dust throughout the stage-sets. Collectively the elements arouse an undercurrent of abandonment, loss and a sense of absence.

Leaving the exhibition invoked a memory of Christian Boltanski’s mammoth installation Personnes, created at the Grand Palais, Paris, last winter. He also used clothes as his primary motif and his discreetly laid out field of clothing became a landscape of worn coats, bright cardigans, children’s sweaters, shabby jumpers and dejected skirts. He delved into the shadowy world of death, evoking a sense of tragedy, humor and absurdity with his chosen materials and their placements.

Without a doubt, Charles LeDray’s work is poetic and he is a master craftsman. However, his ideas are becoming tiresome and threatening to become monotonous, resulting in visual clichés. One hopes that the piece, MENS SUITS, signals a new track for LeDray and that this well-worn motif has run its course. Hopefully, in the future, he will be willing to push his creative energy and explore other challenging territories of human emotion.

by Elaine King, Contributing Writer

The exhibition, Charles LeDray, workworkworkworkwork, will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, until October 17, 2010. www.icaboston.org

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[1] Thomas Finkerpearl, “Why Small is Big,” ARTnews, December 2005