Leslie Hewitt - PPI 3: Post Script: Archives, Annotations and the Unfolding of Time as Image and Agency

Leslie Hewitt - PPI 3: Post Script: Archives, Annotations and the Unfolding of Time as Image and Agency

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Published by Dancing Foxes Press, 2022
Softcover, Staple-bound, 32 pages
25 x 17 cm | 9.75 x 6.75 in
Edited by Shannon Ebner, Karen Kelly, Barbara Schroeder
Text by Leslie Hewitt, conversations with Deborah Willis, Ariella Aisha Azoulay
Design by Chad Kloepfer

ISBN: 9781954947030

From the publisher:

In PPI#3, Leslie Hewitt attempts to come to terms with both the teaching and the unlearning of photographs through an examination of reportage photography, portraiture, and conceptual art. Through a staging of and search for mediated sites of resistance, this process expands on how a public might collectively reconcile grief and images of trauma. In an effort to redress these issues through public dialogue, Hewitt organized two pivotal conversations over the course of 2020, one with artist, author, and scholar Deborah Willis; and the other with author, curator, filmmaker and theorist of photography and visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. By presenting a range of conceptual and historical strategies over the course of the issue, Hewitt finds ways to address images, moving with agency to reclaim power in spaces that attempt to arbitrate critique and exhibit care for the lives of people and the afterlives of their images.

PPI#3 originated in fall 2019 with TEACHING PHOTOGRAPHS, a symposium co-organized by Shannon Ebner and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Leslie Hewitt organized this issue as a “postscript” to the symposium, responding in and out of time with the fraught and divisive events of 2020 in the foreground, middle ground, and background of her field of vision.

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.