Published by Osmos Books, 2019
Hardcover, 144 pages
7.5 x 10.5 in
Edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz
Contributions by Nana Adusei-Poku, Lisa Lee, and Eva Respini
ISBN: 9780986166587
From the publisher:
Featured in the Guggenheim’s 2015 landmark Photo-Poetics exhibition, New York–based artist Leslie Hewitt (born 1977) is one of the most revered artists working between photography and sculpture. Collaboration has been a central part of Hewitt’s art, including projects with William Cordova and Matt Keegan, and her ongoing work with cinematographer Bradford Young exploring the Menil Collection archive of civil rights-era photographs.
About the artist:
That cinematic rumination on historicity and the relationship of the archive to memory, minimalism, lived experience and time, sets an exemplary precedent for this first monograph surveying Hewitt’s oeuvre. Edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz with texts by Nana Adusei-Poka and others, and designed by Garrick Gott, with color reproductions and in-depth critical essays, this book offers rare insights into the artist’s extensive personal archive of images, concepts and ideas.
Leslie Hewitt’s hybrid approach to photography and sculpture revisits the still life genre from a post-minimalist perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the disciplines of photography and film theory, respectively, are spare assemblages of ordinary effects and materials, suggesting the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical histories. Whether discreetly arranged in layers on wooden planks or stacked before a wall in her studio, Hewitt’s objects often include personal mementos such as family pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines that reference the black literary and popular-culture ephemera of her upbringing. Interested in the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory, she decisively challenges both by unfolding manifestly formal, rather than didactic, connections in her heteroclite juxtapositions. She puts pressure on physical space as the ultimate frame of her photo sculptures by displaying some of them leaning against a wall, as they were originally conceived. Hewitt further works with site-specific installation and film as modalities to contend equally with the notions of space and time.