Making the commonplace strange is central to the work of Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray. Often creating hybrid forms, he embraces diverse mediums--including sculpture, photography, performance, and film--to communicate his slightly absurd take on the familiar objects that surround us: tables, shelves, clocks, automobiles, department-store mannequins. His work has been called "conceptual realism," as he often melds intriguing abstract ideas with a figurative tradition rooted in classical art technique. Keystones to his work are immaculate craftsmanship, simple trompe l'oeil devices, odd shifts in scale or expected relationships between viewer and object, and displacements in time. He has commented that for him, "the struggle is to bring [an] idea into the world in a non-trite way, so that it reenchants the world or activates it, somehow." Let's Entertain features Revolution Counter Revolution (1990), a sculpture of a carousel one might find in an old-fashioned carnival. A hand-turned mechanical device moves the carousel in two directions simultaneously, thus causing the horses and sleds to appear perfectly still. At once witty and subtle, the work transports us to a somewhat hallucinatory space where time has stopped. The discrepancy between what the eye appears to "see" and the actuality of the situation destabilizes our notions of reality and calls the very idea of a "still life" into question. The precision of the timing and the mechanism that controls this sculpture are indicative of the artist's exacting attention to detail. The merry-go-round, a traditional icon of the county fair and simple values, becomes part of a contemporary and private game that freezes and questions the spectacle of the family and entertainment. In a world filled with predictable mass-media images, Ray provides new models for contemplation and enchantment.
