Sikkema Jenkins

LESLIE HEWITT
3 September – 5 October 2013

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Leslie Hewitt, her first solo show with the gallery, on view from September 3 through October 5, 2013.

Leslie Hewitt uses the language of photography to interrogate the function of memory by calling to attention the displacement in time and location that occurs in its realm. This has led Hewitt to think about how we process images, even as the photograph continues to dematerialize into the virtual plane. Curator Randi Hopkins notes: “By viewing the photograph both as an object and as an image, Hewitt is able to explore the sculptural weight and portable nature of the photograph, and to address the fact that we encounter photographs transported in time as well as in space. A photograph always documents the past, and also always exists displaced from the location it represents, yet it maintains an indexical relationship to the time and place of its origin – points to it, is inextricably tied to it.” Even as images are reproduced and disseminated, they continue to reference their original context with documentary specificity or with only vague reminiscence or geometric abstraction.

The current exhibition positions distinct bodies of works - Riffs on Real Time (2013), selections from Still Life (2013), Flowers (2013), and two sculptural interventions - as interlocutors. Continuing a body of work begun in 2002, the works in Riffs on Real Time share a formal compositional structure – layered constructions of collaged elements are arranged on her studio floor, which Hewitt has photographed from above. Within that set structure and perspective, Hewitt creates visual syncopation, breaks, or points of rest between the elements within each frame, and within the series as a whole.

The use of repetition and seriality enables Hewitt to forge a connection between carefully selected disparate elements as well as to underscore the fact that the works exist over time across the span of a continuing project. Referencing temporality, Hewitt merges narratives to approach the subject of time, through political, social and subjective terms. She pieces together unrelated material, forming an amalgamations that are “ideally more expansive than the original material, bringing juxtaposition and perspective into play, pushing the form to address several concepts all at once. "

Hewitt’s engagement with time and the representations of such is motivated by the desire to explore lapses in historical narratives. To transform lack of data/information into a propositions with viewers regarding the relationships between fragments and somehow creating an expanded visual field, full of associations, variation and possibility. In Still Life (2013), there is a constant yet subtle refrain throughout the series provided by James Baldwin’s seminal 1963 text, The Fire Next Time, seen in each photograph alternating in visibility. Positioned in relation to found photographs, other books, a maple wood board, and a perfectly sliced lemon (a nod toward the symbolism of citrus fruit in 17th century still life painting), the composition is a continuum of a deconstructed yet reassembled contemporary still life.

Flowers (2013) a lithography created while in residency at Artpace, Hewitt traveled to Houston, Texas, to research and document aspects of the Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil collection photography archive; studying the archive brought several questions to her mind about the way history is remembered: What wasn’t pictured? What was missed? What were moments lost in between the release of the original camera shutter and now? Ultimately, how to make such questions visible or even felt became a catalyst for her project at Artpace. As a result, she used a micro lens to photographically record fragments pulled from the image field of the archive. In contrast to her other works, she moved away from collage within pictorial space to the exploration of perspective and shifts in perspective through abstraction and fragmentation.

The two wall interventions mirror the dimensions of the gallery doorways. Appropriating the language of the gallery’s architecture, these large scale gestures propose new relationships between the works on view as well as the works in relation to the viewer, ultimately shifting attention back and forth between opticality or virtuality and the physical experience all of the works demand in real time.

Leslie Hewitt was born in Saint Albans, NY in 1977 and lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a MFA from Yale University School of Art. She has exhibited in a number of American and international galleries and her work is in the public collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; among others. In the spring of 2012 she was a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the visual arts at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

Hewitt’s collaborative project with cinematographer Bradford Young, Untitled (Structures), was recently exhibited at Des Moines Art Center and The Menil Collection, Houston. The exhibition will travel to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago from March 15 through September 7, 2014. The project will also be presented at the Lofoten International Art Festival in Svolvær and Kabelvåg in the Lofoten archipelago in the north of Norway from September 6 through 29, and at the Images Festival at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada, in the Spring of 2014.