Mens Suits

Everything was made by hand by the artist: hundreds of items of re-cut, stitched and sewed clothing; carefully carved and modelled wooden palettes; and plastic coat-hangers. Remarkable for its meticulous detail, the work had a quiet, arresting presence. The visitor stood over the sculpture, and its very specific scale invited a particular intensity of looking.

Arranged across the ground floor of a former fire station in Marylebone, London, Mens Suits* alluded to a charity shop or thrift store. The work was configured into three distinct tableaux, demarcated by floor tiles and suspended lighting systems, and related to different ways in which clothing is encountered in a second-hand shop; careful displays, casual racks and chaotic piles.  

All the items of clothing carried a feeling of having being used. They had a life, dressing some body, and bore a sense of fatigue. They were waiting to be used again. Surrogates for identity, they embodied the desire to reveal and conceal: to be marked out as an individual and belong to a tribe. 

Mens Suits imparted no specific stories. The clothes kept their secrets. Taken as a totality however, Le Dray's ensemble invited reflection on larger narratives of conformity and difference, rejection and renewal, value and use in contemporary society. 

Following its presentation in London, Mens Suits was exhibited at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam , and was subsequently included in a major survey of the artist's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Whitney Museum in New York and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2010–2011.

*Mens Suits was intentionally given in the vernacular, neglecting grammatical conventions.

Image: Folded shirts, t-shirts and jumpers, a detail from Mens Suits by Charles LeDray, 2009. Photograph: Tom Powel

Video: Like a Memory: Perspectives on Mens Suits

What I'm struck by first off is the quietness actually. Because you come in here and you realise that once upon a time, probably not that long ago, this would have been the scene of quite frenzied noisy activity: guys in uniforms sliding down poles, rushing towards engines. LeDray has gone against all that and created something completely 'other'.

Directed by Sam Blair

Available to watch on Vimeo and YouTube.

Image: Coat hangers on a clothing rail, part of Mens Suits by Charles LeDray (2009). Photograph: Julian Abrams

By James Lingwood, 2009

Mens Suits contains multitudes. On an obvious level, LeDray’s sculptural ensemble includes hundreds of different parts which resemble suits, shirts, ties and hangers as well as a number of tables, display racks, laundry bags, ceilings and floors, all painstakingly recreated on a diminutive scale. Less overtly, a multiplicity of possible meanings are embedded within the complex arrangements of the work. Beyond the immediate pleasures offered by the kaleidoscopic array of patterned and coloured materials and the astonishing degree of detail, LeDray’s carefully constructed world offers a meditation on appearance and identity, sameness and difference; a mise-en-scène of our current social and economic condition and the way it uses and values people and things; and a reflection on the intertwining of sculpture and the vernacular over the past century. 

All of this is distilled within three separate sections, each of them clearly demarcated by a rectangular floor on which different individual elements have been arranged, and a corresponding plasterboard ceiling from which fluorescent lights illuminate the tableaux below. The object of the sculpture comprises everything we see, from the dust resting on the top of the ceilings (themselves suspended from the ceiling of the space) to the dirt on the carpet and lino; from the voluminous number of elements made from clothing to the volume of space between the ceiling and the floor. They are like three-dimensional wedges which you can gaze into and look through.

Nothing is here by accident; everything – every last nuanced detail and implied incident - is by design. There is no particular sequence to the three sections, no beginning, middle and end; no specific narrative to follow through the successive stages of the encounter with the work, no overt pointers as to a particular interpretative route to follow. Mens Suits is a work which shows but does not tell.

In London, one of the first objects encountered is a scaled-down version of dressed tailor’s dummy, standing on a low wooden pedestal, which sits on a shabby floor of lino and carpet. The sculpture of the dummy - the most anthropomorphic of the many forms in LeDray’s sculpture – introduces what is everywhere and nowhere in Mens Suits: the human body. The extravagantly dressed figure is a work in progress, its tailoring as yet incomplete. It stands to attention, ready for inspection. Displaying its finest plumage, hoping to attract a mate, waiting for a body to be fitted to; or, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, a voice to speak for it.

Read the rest.

Image: detail from Mens Suits by Charles LeDray, 2009. Photograph: Julian Abrams.

Selected Press

It is not clear which men LeDray is referring to, only that worn-out, second-hand clothes are being used to represent them. Every fold tells a story - about a period of life lived and now finished but one that insists on reclaiming at least some attention even after being used for something else. The states of mind that emerge from them, like modesty, exuberance, humour, seriousness, impetuousness and sweetness, in the absence of a human presence, depend solely on these non-essential things. They are transformed into attitudes, and as such take turns in suggesting diverse and simultaneous interpretations for the work. — Michele Robecchi, Domus (Italy), April 2009.

The scale excites tenderness, delight and a sort of pity. It is extraordinary how the clothes look old and new. Fastidiously refashioned, they wear their hopeful hearts on their sleeves. Yet they are also tired, telltale and secondhand. But what I love most is LeDray's determination to release the clothes from any need to be worn, leaving them free to have lives of their own. — Kate Kellaway, The Observer, 12 July 2009.

LeDray’s work has been compared to that of contemporaries such as Robert Gober and Mike Kelley, but although I can see many areas in which these artists share an interest in common themes, like social and economic class, for me the most helpful context in which to view him is as the heir to American realist artists of the Depression era. Though he never represents the human figure, the world he shows us is the city life that Reginald Marsh would have recognised. He looks with infinite compassion on the belongings of the dispossessed and the down and out, the downside of the American dream. — Richard Dorment The Telegraph, 20 July 2009.

Image: detail from Mens Suits by Charles LeDray, 2009. Photo: Tom Powel.

Credits

This project was supported by Arts Council England, Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.

Join Artangel and support extraordinary new art