Book Review: Charles LeDray -- workworkworkworkworkpublished by Skira Rizzoli and the ICA Boston

Textile, the second flesh: an assiduousness to its weaving, the intensive laying-on of thread to thread that counts out instants of time while forming the material of an outer skin. The practical forms we create with textiles document human form, need, desire, modesty.

Charles LeDray's textile creations and installations echo these aspects of our lives in ways that are at times both amusing and profound. His pieces read like remnants of lives imagined yet not lived, shadows of fictive presences. In the case of his human bone pieces, authentic human remnants wrested and reconfigured toward aesthetic fictions.

Rizzoli and the ICA deal LeDray's ouvre a working class justice with Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork, a volume accompanying the ICA's touring survey of the same name. Large full-color photos pack most of its pages tightly and present the artist's work with all the clarity that's likely possible in a book this size (what, a bit less than 200 pages?).

LeDray's body of work boggles the mind in terms of obsessiveness, to be sure, but also in terms of sheer variety. Small hats, little suits, a miniature coat rack with a ratty, torn coat perfectly recreated at half-size, strange little remnants in frames, stuck to walls, installations of miniature clothing stores complete with drop-ceiling, tiny doll furniture carved of human bone -- the survey and the book could only present a sampling, but what a sampling it is.

A handful of essays at the front do a great job of introducing LeDray's work and setting it within a historical and contemporary context. In particular I enjoyed Adam D. Weinberg's inclusion of LeDray in a lineage that includes William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Allan McCollum and Mel Bochner.

Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork earns four out of five miniature wizard hats for being a downright satisfying perusal and a terrific introduction to the work of this intriguing artist. And right now you can land it in your library for a song: a mere $27.50 at Amazon.

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