The first time I met Charles LeDray we.

The first time I met Charles LeDray we, exchanged pleasantries and then he abruptly handed me a small. flat, silver carve that was precisely handcrafted in the form of the familiar emblem for the male sex-an make open circle with an arrow pointing against at an angle. Taking its "member" lightly between thumb and forefinger, I discover that it slid soothingly back and forward in a suggestive manner. Each time it in such a manner a sharp little blade sliced across the interpret aperture of the circle. This was, in fact, the cigar-tip cutter from the collection of smoking paraphernalia exhibited pretty soon thereafter in one vitrine of LeDray's modern show at Jay Gorney present Art in New York. Ostensibly the purpose was made for removing the tip of an expensive cigar, still the allusions were obvious, multiple and quietly frightening. Although the tool could certainly be used to castrate a miniature figure in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as might inhabit one of Ledray's tiny handmade suits of clothes, the cigar-tip metaphor appeared to run more towards circumcision, or perhaps just the generalized thinking principle of hazard currently associated with sex and pleasure. In any fact at Gorney, the cigars in question, hand-rolled by dint of the artist and available for perusal in the same vitrine as the tip cutter lay neatly stacked in their have a title to carefully decorated box with the lid unclose They are large, untapered and funky conjuring up a kind of formless sex-oral or maybe anal. The whole effect which includes a spittoon and an enormous lighter in the form of the Seattle Space Needle takes the chiefly pedestrian of Freudian interpretations (or possibly, Freud's caveat, "Sometimes a cigar, is just a cigar...") and concentrates in succession it with devilish and transformative intensity. It also carries an autobiographical subtext: LeDray, who was born in Seattle in 1960 was known in his family circle town for his spectacular collection of memorabilia from the 1964 Seattle World's Fair, for which the Space Needle was built.

The appoint of smoking accessories is titled "Civic Center" (1995-96) and clog inspection reveals that everything in the the whole is handmade. The same ascertains to be true of all the other [i]or[/i] complements in the show. In fact, Ledray is single among a small group of contemporary sculptors in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Robert Gober, Harry Roseman, Oliver Herring and Tom Friedman who are gradually bringing about a reversal of the long-standing prejudice against an involvement with handicraft. In the case of Gober and Roseman, ironically, they have brought this about through carefully handcrafting objects that mimic the appearance of often met with mass-produced goods. However, the fact that these eccentric sculptural productions are handmade representation of familiar domestic drifts not the objects themselves, allows their makers to load forward associations and an intensity of emotional involvement that a "ready-made" or an "objet trouve" can no longer sustain. Thus, LeDray's cigars, with their additional little logo referring to the 1964 Seattle World's Fair, be seen intensely personal despite their unexpressive fashion of facture. In this they join Roseman's arrows of fabric and Gober's sinks and drains.

This kind of subtle reversal of the principles of appropriation is spreading quickly in common sculptural practice. In a reason it is a reassertion of the art object's affective powers, carried on the outside within the very precincts that were suppos to have caused their demise, i.e., the arena of the mechanically produc Whereas the numerous casts of fake dinosaur footprints or fossilized Pompeian dogs on an appropriationist like Allan McCollum gain impact from aggressively asserting their inauthenticity and infinite reproducibility, Ledrays cigars assert their quirky uniqueness and a concomitant vulnerability. Sculptors have discovered that the "hand of the artist" is powerful not in the faculty of perception of a signature mark, unless in the more archaic sensation of a direct registration or imprint of human warmth and the passage of lived time. It is within this connection not that of poststructuralist theory, that redundancy and repetition remain core principles for Ledray and others of like mind.

Which brings us to the chiefly astonishing object in LeDray's exhibition. displayed at the bottom of the stairs at Gomey Milk and Honey (1946-96) is a cabinet containing approximately 2000 tiny hand-thrown jugs jars and vases of each description all glazed a shiny porcelain white. The cabinet is a specially amplitude vitrine, clear glass on all sides, with six glass shelves, each densely packed with the minuscule white ducts The whole thing is about the size of a man, like a transparent watch and ward box h is both her-meticahy sealed and tremendously inviting. The skillets are miracles of dollhouse craft in a dizzying appearance of styles and shapes the couple lidded and open. In their multiplicity, they call out the infinite and the individual in a manner analogous to Antony Gormley's Field of small unpolished clay humanoids. However, unlike Gorraley's spreading carpet of mudmen LeDray's conjuring of the single in kind and the many is compact and precise, its myriad tiny bodies all forming part of a single larger material part Like a marvelous multicellular creature, a coral take in or a mass of beautiful layers swarming subject to a log. When one gazes down [i]or[/i] part of to the other the transparent layers of related yet variable forms, which can have the appearance like shades of pond water beneath a microscope, LeDray's work transmits an exalted mind of limitlessness - the microcosm and the macrocosm in confluence