Charles LaBelle's sculptures, drawings and photographs investigate the interaction of memory and experience. He is particularly interested in those liminal areas where one thing is slipping into another. LaBelle typically works with materials taken from everyday life and which retain trace elements of the interior lives of other people; this approach probes the essentially unknowable histories and desires of the private self. In Restless Mass (1999), he gathered together approximately 700 pounds of used bedclothes and bedding, tore it into strips, and created a sphere that was then hung from the ceiling. For Disappearer (Shirt That Has Passed Through My Body) (1999) LaBelle cut up a white shirt into two inch squares, ate them, and reconfigured the pieces after they passed through his body, the evidence of their journey now inscribed upon their surface. The photographic body of work titled Night Moves (1999) comprises a series of "compound photos" each consisting of hundreds of one-inch square images of neon signs around Los Angeles. Taken during LaBelle's numerous car trips around the city at night, the individual squares look and function like jump cuts in a piece of film, and likewise they effect a slippage between spatial and temporal dimensions.

Disappear (Shirt That Has Passed Through My Body), 1999
Shirt, mending tape; 40x32x24 in