Why am I thinking all this? Because I’ve just come back from the Charles LeDray exhibition titled “workworkworkworkwork,’’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art. It’s not that it’s a depressing show. Quite the opposite. LeDray is one of contemporary art’s brightest stars, and this show, organized by the ICA’s Randi Hopkins, is the most beautiful, poignant, and witty show the ICA has mounted since moving to its new waterfront home in 2006.
LeDray treats clothes as surrogates for human identity, particularly male identity, and for the many types of work that go into constructing it. As such — and unlike the fashion industry, which is founded on an unblinking faith in the potential of clothes to communicate power, beauty, and self-worth — his work is intensely alive to the pathos clothes can communicate, and to the many senses in which they just don’t . . . quite. . . fit.
LeDray, who was born in Seattle in 1960 and lives and works in New York, gives this “not quite fitting’’ a literal twist. The majority of the clothes he makes and transforms into sculptures are small. Too small to wear, but not so small that they seem precious or cute.
And yes, LeDray makes them. All of them. By hand. Himself.
You can’t help but marvel: MyGod,the work! It’s a response that speaks, obviously, to the show’s title. And it relates not just to the sculptures LeDray makes from his small-scale clothes, but to the thousands of tiny ceramic vessels he throws, and to the eccentric little sculptures he carves from ivory and human bone. (Yes, human bone.)
Today, when the actual making of art objects is frequently displaced from the hands of the nominal creator to various anonymous assistants, there’s an atavistic appeal in LeDray’s displays of virtuosic skill and dedication. But it’s not just a sentimental appeal.
