MELODİ BÜYÜKÖZER (PSYC/IV)
buyukozer@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Smelling the Past: Charles Ledray's Diminuitive
"workworkworkworkwork"
According to the website for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), for over 20 years, New York-based artist Charles LeDray has created handmade sculptures in stitched fabric, carved bone, and wheel-thrown clay. LeDray painstakingly fashions smaller-than-life formal suits, embroidered patches, ties, and hats, as well as scaled-down chests of drawers, doors, thousands of unique, thimble-sized vessels, and even complex models of the solar system:
http://www.icaboston.org /exhibitions/exhibit/ledray/.
Although, I have my own ideas about some forms of contemporary art, I found Charles Ledray's "workworkworkworkwork" exhibition at ICA inspirational. With small beds, small clothes, small accessories, thousands of small detailed pottery items, small hat collections, small books and rainbows, it brings back the faded smells and forgotten images of my childhood, which made the exhibition a personal experience for me.
Living in Istanbul for the first nine years of my life, one of the strongest smells that I remember is the smell of humidity. More specifically, the smell of humid "things": damp clothes, damp dust, damp wood furniture. This smell is automatically attached to all my childhood memories with the image of something dark, maybe a dim yellow light or the ambiguity of a rainy day: The sound of the waves and the feeling on my face when the wind brings the salty water of the sea to kiss my face and closing my eyes to smell the wetness, feeling the humidity, and becoming damp.
Being the Gulliver in the exhibition, while examining all the small clothes on that small bed, I noticed that there was a tiny glove under the bed. This reminded me of looking at my old childhood clothes that I don't even remember wearing, then putting them in the suitcase again when I am done looking and putting them all away with the dust of the past but forgetting that tiny glove under the bed. Then realizing that glove later and going right back into your childhood: You can see a different, more naïve, and inexperienced version of yourself, and yet you can still long for that. Then you look around and see other people experiencing similar feelings, and finally you start to feel free among other people who are also recalling their dusty childhood memories with tearful eyes.
Closing my eyes after seeing Charles Ledray's work, and opening them back again to my childhood full of humid memories, all to be gone in a wink. This should be what they call making peace with the past, I guess.