Layers of Meaning

Charles LeDray - Hometown Boy Sews Good

In the world of small miracles, I discovered that one of my former students, Charles LeDray, has become famous! Not just slightly famous, but really, really famous - "Venice Biennale, Chelsea gallery and traveling museum retrospective" type of famous. Best of all, I still find his work as delightful and funny as when he was a charmingly sneering 15 year old at Queen Anne High in Seattle (he once grew tired of the requisite realistic drawing of a soda cracker and so he posted his final work: the actual cracker glued to his drawing paper.)

Charles works in miniature in a variety of materials, but the works that caught my interest are the sewn pieces. The Seattle arts community has embraced him as a genius son, after LeDray's New York success. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote of his 2003 show: "Hungering to own one of Seattle artist Michelle Clise's antique teddy bears, he decided to make his own fake antique teddies. Thus he jumped the gate from blocked painter to magical conjurer of craft-based art objects... After getting a job as art handler at the Jack Tilton Gallery, he showed the director, Jenine Cirincione, one of his jackets for a teddy bear ("Mourning Piece," 1989). She hung it in a group show hours before it opened.

After that, his career took off. Instead of being the undereducated innocent he appeared to be in his hometown, he turned out to be a sophisticated innovator capable of making history in New York. He represents the revenge of the handmade, the triumph of domestic skill over costly corporate spectacle, the raw over the cooked, the heartfelt over the glossy.

"S.A.M." from 1994 is a replica of his museum-guard suit, slightly bigger than his hand. It's what he wore when no one was asking him anything more taxing than directions to the bathroom. Hanging on the wall on a hanger he made, it carries its own madcap narrative with it, a rumpled, lived-in story of the born to be overlooked.

"What I hide by my language, my body utters," wrote Roland Barthes in "A Lover's Discourse." LeDray's suits of clothes are bodies, really, unable to conceal the meaning of their lives. "Becoming Mr. Man" from 1992 tells the tale of desperate intellectual, pockets stuffed with poems and lapels unfashionably wide, the bulk of its frustrated desires battering the fabric."

Excerpts from an ArtForum review reminds me that LeDray's high school years occurred when Linda Barry was the reigning queen of Seattle angst: "What makes him more than just a highly skilled maker of miniatures is the density of personal and cultural anxieties and elations that he puts into his best work...public eroticism, the power of the handmade in a machine-made world... a gothic display of pain, guilt and anger, the wonder of a cosmos without a providential deity--all of these things are part of our moment," and, Taplin says, "LeDray is packing them into his objects."" I think the moral here is that workmanship counts, but it's all pointless without the emotion behind it.

For the true fans, Charles even has his own retrospective book out.