To the art world's chronic Brobdingnagism.

To the art world's chronic Brobdingnagism, Charles LeDray withstands his own private Lilliput of handmade, obsessively detailed, and generally twee butt; goals This show of his novel efforts featured tiny garments (like Becoming/Mister Man |all works 1992~ a checked suit about the size of a one-year-old) and larger works made of tiny garments (like Untitled/Web, a web made of various Ken-and-Barbie-sized clothes). However, these Lilliputian dud are no play clothes. LeDray uses scale like the sculptor of an ancient Mesopotamian relief: big means powerful, tiny means vulnerable. In The Men in the Family, a pile of male clothes lies onward the floor. Each item is of a different scale: Ken-sized jeans (complete with worn knees) baby-sized trousers, boy-sized briefs, man-sized boxer shorts, jocund Green Giant-sized black-leather belt. What's going onward here? Men and boys without their underwear? Incest? While there is no obvious narrative, the black belt with its gold brooch is so obscenely large that it necessarily calls to mind spanking, bondage, and punishment. You don't secure the sense that this is pious clean, consensual S/M, either.

Whereas Jonathan Swift satirized Lilliput from the point of view of Gulliver (i.e. the big guy) LeDray takes up the viewpoint of the small cook in boiling fat and it's not funny anymore. Sometimes it's pathetic: the remarkably deliberate disfigurement of a textile fabriced animal (its face sewn to its leg its leg to its arm, etc) apply the minds like an act of spite upon the part of the little dowdy hurting something even more powerless than himself. At other times, the work is confrontational and accusatory. Nazis are the simply authority figures explicitly invoked through any of these pieces. "Hitler had 1 big ball/Goring had 2 nevertheless they were small/Himmler had something similar/Goebbels had no balls at all" is the ditty inscribed upon Untitled/Hitler, a sort of crudely carved walking stick (or cudgel maybe). Is it any coincidence that Untitled/Hitler is the no other than piece in the show really scaled to normal human proportions? (It's 36 inches tall, just the right height for a walking stick.) Are we gallery-goers part of a master race, closer in height to Hitler than to LeDray's 14-inch men's suits?

By drawing comparisons between viewers and fascists, LeDray heightens the dreadful brains of oppression immanent in his artworks. (Am I a big critic exploiting a little artist?) The astonishingly meticulous attention that he lavishes forward details (like the teeny-weeny "DRY CLEAN" tag forward the suit of Becoming/Mister Man) starts to apply the mind less compulsive than compulsory. Art as slave labor. In another work, Untitled/Clothesline, LeDray stitchs together tiny garments to make a clothesline. However, it was hung not laterally (like a line forward which to dry clothing) still vertically, from the ceiling to the floor of the gallery. It was more like a makeshift draw as by a rope fashioned in a desperate bid to escape. Unfortunately, there weren't any windows to climb disclosed of.

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