Leslie Fry: More than she appears to be
The Times Argus, October 1, 2004

By Anne Galloway, Times Argus Staff

The back room of the Firehouse Gallery looks like a warehouse for derelict statues. Gnomish sphinxes, columns, ziggurats and fallen temples are laid atop one another in a jumble, like toppled idols from Grecian or Roman times or saints from the Middle Ages.

But none of the figures in this modern ruin are what they appear to be. A six-foot ionic column in the middle of the pile is more than just another displaced architectural element entwined in a mass of concrete forms. The column sports comely breasts and a pear-shaped figure shrouded in a caryatid-like empire dress. And the nearby sphinxes are enigmatic females with Rapunzel-like braids that trail down their backs.

This careful compilation of cannibalized parts of buildings and humans is a surrealistic installation by artist Leslie Fry who is best known in Burlington for her public art pieces - her sculpture on Mermaid House on North Avenue and her 20 columnar female sphinxes in Pomerleau Neighborhood Park. Her current show at the Firehouse, Cast-offs: Girls, Riddles, Fate, is a combination of works Fry created over the last 12 years (represented by the aforementioned pieces in her "ruin") and a sampling of her latest foray into new 3-dimensional forms - a series of bas relief sculptures made from paper. The latter are from her stint this summer as the Firehouse artist-in-residence and are featured in the front of the gallery.

While the materials Fry uses in this show couldn't be more different, (the concrete sculptures have a monumental permanence and the paper forms a delicate temporality) the work has a remarkable consistency. That's in part because the casting process for the materials is similar (rubber molds are used in the casting of the concrete sculptures; plaster for the paper forms), but it also has to do with Fry's perfectionism and wry sensibilities.

Fry is a surrealist; she creates ironic visual nonsequitors that read like oddly natural metaphors. By marrying parts of ordinary objects together into bizarre objets d'art, she transforms the familiar into weird fantasy forms all her own.

In the "ruin" Fry successfully combines conventional objects - shoes, dresses, nuts and fruits - with classical architectural elements. These odd juxtapositions seamlessly hold together because of her meticulous attention to detail, acute sense of perspective and form, and single-minded focus on an idea. A pile of rubber molds in the corner of the back room is part of the installation. These cast-offs from the castings are "skins" shed in the process of the evolution of Fry's work. It seems like a natural extension of the main event.

Fry takes the fusion of forms even further in her exhibit of new works in the front gallery. She created paper casts from objects that intrigued her over the course of the summer: knotted pieces of rope, spirals of string, faces of dolls, her own fingers, zippers, artichokes, fish tails, oranges, and so on. In the end, she had hundreds of individual objects ostensibly unrelated to one another. She arranged the pieces into compositions. Once she was satisfied with a given arrangement, she washed it with India ink to draw attention to the texture of the paper cast and then affixed them to brushed aluminum shadow boxes. The boxes are minimalist constructions a la Donald Judd, and the textural contrast works. The rectangular frames give Fry's small frail looking pieces context and presence without overwhelming their subtlety.

The bas reliefs are like light airy constructions, but the subject matter Fry tackles is dark and difficult. All of the sculptures are metaphors for the female condition. The faces of crones, young girls and middle age women surface in all of the images in conjunction with objects that Fry construes as body parts.

In Freeplay a female figure's hands are folded over her privates. Six spider-like fingers emanate from where her hips might have been and below this monstrosity is a vulva shaped oval halved by a zipper. A finger protrudes from the bottom of the sculpture.

This thinly veiled allusion to masturbation is one of the most overtly feminist pieces in the show. Most of Fry's sculptures are pieced-together, absurd illustrations of females who are anything but in control of their sexuality. This exhibit seems to illustrate how Fry has torn herself away from the haunting whimsy of her earlier work in the "ruin" and turned to a darker, even more potent form of surrealism.