LeDray's dream objects: in talismanic objects handcrafted at sometimes Lilliputian scale, Charles LeDray defies masculine conventions to evoke a yearning for the maternal embrace and the security it once bestowed - Charles LeDray

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Ken Johnson

Though technically very different, Milk and Honey (1994-96) works in a comparable fashion. It is a large, wood-framed, glass cabinet containing glass shelves, on which are crowded an astonishing multitude of little hand-thrown clay pots, 2,000 in all, glazed off-white. The display of so many similar yet unique objects calls to mind Allan McCollum's accumulations, but LeDray's purpose is more straightforwardly humanistic. Each empty vessel is like a funerary urn, a memorial to a departed soul.

A somewhat problematic component of the LeDray retrospective is the series of faux-antique miniatures carved (as the wall labels inform us) from human bone. They include a tiny door lying flat, a rustic Chippendale-style washstand and, most remarkably, a "tellurian," an astronomical device that models the relationship between the earth, the moon and the sun. With all its gears and levers realized to near perfection, the device looks as though it might actually go through its exacting revolutions if you turned the tiny crank.

It's not the benign or rather esoteric iconography that is hard to fathom. (While LeDray prefers not to divulge where he gets his supply of bone, it has long been available on the Internet, among other places.) Using human bone as an art-making material seems manipulative, a shock tactic. That said, a sympathetic eye may see the transformation of bone into art as a kind of resurrection. The point is best made in a full-size ear of grain (Wheat, 2000) that looks as if it belongs in a botanical museum: the raw detritus of death is transmuted by the artist into a symbol of life.

LeDray evokes death with richer ambiguity in Jewelry Window (2002), a miniaturized store-display window built into the wall. Peering through the plate glass into a dark, backlit interior, you discover pedestals, truncated necks and other devices for the presentation of watches, necklaces and rings, covered in dark gray velvet. But the jewelry itself is gone, as though the store's proprietor had gathered it up for nocturnal safekeeping, leaving a haunted, cemeterylike landscape.

Loss is most powerfully concentrated in Untitled/Mattress (1995), a telephone-book-sized representation of a mattress, displayed near the floor on a low platform. The stuffed and tufted ticking shows signs of years of abuse--stains from all the blood, sweat, tears and other bodily fluids shed over a thousand dark nights of the soul. It is the kind of object you find stripped naked and thrown out on the street to be carted away by sanitation workers. Fashioned by the artist with immense tenderness, it becomes a visceral icon of mortality and redemption.

"Charles LeDray: Sculpture 1989-2002" was seen at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia [May 11-July 14]. The show will travel to the Arts Club of Chicago [Sept. 20-Dec. 21]; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco [Jan. 25-Apr. 6, 2003]; and the Seattle Art Museum [Apr. 26-July 27, 2003]. The exhibition is accompanied by a 116-page catalogue with an essay by Russell Ferguson and a conversation between the artist and Claudia Gould. In February 2003, LeDray will have a solo show at Sperone Westwater in New York.