Well-Heeled

For eight years, artist Greg Carideo has been collecting shoe heels that he finds on the streets of New York. From his collection, which now numbers in the hundreds, eight heels have made their way into the small wallmounted sculptures that make up his solo exhibition Dog Eared Reverie at Foreign & Domestic.

Drawing on a previous series of sculptures that referenced commercial awnings, this latest work evokes medieval reliquaries—elevating the urban castoff to the realm of the sacred. Inside its custom-made armature, each shoe heel gains a multitude of associations: it is a tunnel, a portal, a door, a window. Silver-brazed steel structural elements and fabric collages made primarily from tattered T-shirts lend the sculptures a sense of delicate balance, and images of architectural details carefully stitched into the textile elements draw a connection to Carideo’s collection of photography. These are no mere found-object sculptures; they are something else, something akin to altars for the intimate.