Arts Review

'Michelle Mayer: Departure/Return'

Wally Workman Gallery, 1202 W. Sixth, 472-7428, www.wallyworkmangallery.com

Through April 30

Imagine a young and elegant Mother Nature on the catwalk, assaying a strut-pause-strut for the likes of Ferragamo or Blahnik or whatever house of fashion, one of the current brands of footwear marketed to those who prefer a bright stain of status affirmation enhancing the shoemaker's craft. You know that, regardless of the deep co-branding scenario necessary for this metaphor to have legs at all, the Lady's not rocking the usual hoof caps; she has more organic soul to her soles than even the best of what's been concocted by those glorified cobblers.

We're talking about shoes, yes. Several pairs of them, constructed as if naturally grown from bark and moss and lichen and colorful fungus, shaped perfectly to fit a perfect pair of feet. Those are just some of the works on display in this beautiful one-woman show by Brooklyn's Michelle Mayer. Shoes for Departure, they're called, and we reckon the departure is one of back-to-nature, an exit fully ratified by situational ethics, because nature, abetted by the artist, has made the first move: Mayer's invaded the tony interiors of the Workman Gallery with wild, wild woods.

Never mind evocations of leaf and lignum conjured by William Morris in years long gone by, here the artist has brought the actual stuff to bear. Thick gobbets of forest spring from the walls and, in the gallery's second room, sprawl from a corner and into the middle of the carpeted floor, posed in feral floral profusion atop pedestals until you could swear you just glimpsed Jack in the Green or one of his legion of boggarts and pixies scampering in the shadows.

Here's another thing: Sometimes, in visual art exhibitions or in stage shows or in movies – or in anything, really – success is due not only to a sense of the thing having been done right, but due to the myriad ways in which it might have been done wrong but wasn't. With a thing like this "Departure/Return" show, there were so many missteps that could've been made to leave it seeming a poorly conceived diorama from a cut-rate natural history museum; maybe due to the skill required when walking in those shoes for departure, none of those missteps were made.

Also, Mayer has placed one pair of the shoes under a bell jar, which of course brings the literary protagonist Esther Greenwood to mind – Green, wood, see? And the biblical Esther's original name was Hadassah, meaning "myrtle leaf," which confirms that the artist is obviously ... but, no, you're right: Such wack megillah is better whispered in the dark by Alex Jones after snorting arcane powders from Sylvia Plath's headstone. You and I would do well to remain silent among the foliage and acrylic-domed diatoms of this fine exhibition, listening to Mayer's intermediated songs from the wood.