Army Of The Dolls - Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Germany, Anthony Meier, San Francisco

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Judith E. Stein

Leonard created a second, untitled sculpture opposite the gallery's reception desk by stacking 77 suitcases against the wall in seven irregular piles. Like the participants in a police lineup, these frontal towers of slightly differing heights impassively awaited the scrutiny of visitors passing through the transitional space of the foyer. Arranged more for shape and color than by graduated size, the columns occasionally mimicked figurative curves. The palette leaned toward cool, tasteful hues, with sky blue predominating. Here again, the artist selected a range of vintage examples. Some, bearing brand names such as Amelia Earhart, Travel Joy and Shy Flite, were artifacts from an era when you dressed up to travel.

All found objects, particularly luggage, give off a lost quality. Many of the cases were personalized with monograms and scuffed by wear. Like the dolls once conveyed inside them, they no longer belonged to the people who had used them. Although visually ungendered, the suitcases were, as are all containers, readable as female biological metaphors. Variations in shape, surfaces and fastenings offered clues about their histories. Some handles--for example the sleek, molded-plastic ones of the '60s--are linked to specific moments in the history of design. Several cases conjured up cinematic images: the smart little tote stolen from runaway Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934) or the substantial baggage encumbering a married George Segal trysting with Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class (1973). Darker allusions to the assembled property of Holocaust victims came to mind as well.

Leonard's thematic subtext of lost and found carried through into the final section of the exhibition, a selection of 10 new dye-transfer photographs hung in the front gallery. This series of found still lifes, or "organized remains," in the artist's description,(2) was harvested from sites and shop windows on New York's Lower East Side. Like Leonard's earlier black-and-white works, they form part of a larger, ongoing project that she regards as an urban archive of the handmade world. Part social anthropologist and part material culture expert, Leonard consistently gravitates toward the literal and symbolic signs of life that people leave behind.

With deadpan humor, she shot Sunshine Hotel in a flophouse, its name proclaimed by besmeared ceramic tiles mounted on a scarred red wall. Hand-lettered signage predominates in the photographs of glass-fronted stores: a pinked-edged yellow oval brashly asserts the availability of cold beer; a butcher perplexingly proclaims equal stocks of "goats, lamb, veal, breast"; adjacent to its graffiti-adorned siding, a seedy laundromat mournfully informs passersby of its hours and services. The two hand-me-down chairs loitering outside this enterprise might be the homeless relatives of the pompous upholstered pair smugly waiting inside a showroom in another print from this series.

A sense of quietude emanates from these artfully simple unpeopled views. Some show us figural stand-ins--for example, two orderly pairs of used shoes on makeshift mats, or a tailor's dignified dummy wearing a half-constructed jacket. Leonard's compositional strategy of "getting rid of surrounding noise" eliminates all that might compete with her visual target. In all of the work in this show, we are left with an intensely focused image that speaks in a soft, clear voice about what it is like to be human.