I love meeting collectors. There's nothing more disappointing than entering somebody's home for the first time only to find it clean, manicured, organized, filled with only the things you'd find in an IKEA catalog. When I see where you live I want to find tokens of who you are. I want a story told through objects, a sequence of totems that lets me in to the places you've been and how they've shaped you. Give me souvenirs, figurines, artifacts. Let me tour a museum of you. 

The same expectations apply to cities. Quasi-suburban, ultra-clean town squares don't interest me. I don't care about another Coldstone or yoga studio. Your modern fountains bore me. I want art plastered on the walls. I want a tiny pizza joint that's been owned by the same family for forty years. I want a little evidence that there are people and not consumers living here. 

I'd be thrilled to find an Isaac Cordal piece in real life. He integrates bedroom artifacts into urban landscapes. You might expect to see his figurine's atop a collector's dresser, or at least in a hobbyist's studio. His little clay men have a charming folk art feel to them. They wouldn't look out of place being sold at a stand for ten dollars in an amateur crafts fair. They're worn, comfortably molded. At times they look more like tribal totems than figurines. 

They are, in a way, totems of the contemporary man. Tiny men in tiny suits peek out from dark spaces in and around buildings. They stand on top of walls, they wade in gutter puddles. They line up in the shadow of a bus stop's pole. They lie slumped and dead atop a giant barbed wire fence. There's a sadness to most of them. Occasionally a note of humor arises, as in when two of them contemplate a very tiny painting in a very tiny frame. Mostly, they stand steeped in loneliness--the kind of loneliness that comes to us when we see them and know exactly what it's like to feel that small. The arms reaching out from a sewer grate, the line of bald, slumped businessmen en route to what we assume is work--these are expressions of a stagnation already embedded within the urban environment. These people exist. Here are tiny versions of them. They, at least, are allowed to feel honestly what we all sweep under the well-vacuumed carpet.

Cordal's urban sculpture stands as an example of a series of works that would make no sense outside of their intended public environment. His cement men only evoke what they should evoke when stranded in the vastness of the concrete city. Scale, here, is as important a part of the work as the medium itself. Place his tiny vagabond in a museum and the contrast between the figure and his adjacent apartment complex is gone. We need to see ourselves as so small in a physical sense in order to come to grips with our daily smallness and how the rush of the city--exhilarating as it may be--can leave us gasping for air, for calm, for a more comfortable scale.