Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

The Kitchen in New York City is currently showing On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance, a Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray.  The exhibition features new and recent work by Hewitt in photography, sculpture and film installation.  The Kitchen writes that in this exhibition Hewitt’s ‘…long-standing interest in non-linear perspective merges with W.E.B. Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, to create visually elegant and thoughtfully composed situational works’.

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance brings together a selection of images from three of Hewitt’s photographic projects.  Riffs on Real Time (2008) features sculptural, layered collages with mundane objects created to be captured in photograph.  These sculptural creations reflect the condition of existence through a shared temporality.  In the Midday (2009) series she creates contemporary still-life arrangements that reference our consumerist society through repetition.  Hewitt creates and documents multiple times – making each photographic image of the same still-life arrangement subtly altered in perception.  Hewitt’s newest photographic project, A Series of Projections (2010), breaks down and simplifies the artist’s structural complexities.  In a departure, black and white photographs capture photographic fragments projected onto the studio wall in addition to honing in on objects placed on wooden surfaces.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Like much of Hewitt’s work, her new film installation, created in collaboration with experiential cinematographer Bradford Young, is inspired by a literary source – in this instance Claude Brown’s Harlem migration text Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).  This film installation engages the landscape of a particular place (Harlem) and the manifest implications and effects of movement through this space.  Hewitt and Young drew visual inspiration from Harlem’s dense urban grid, its architectural features and through the study of its street archives.  The Kitchen describes this film installation as featuring ‘a series of silent vignettes’ where ‘time is marked through oscillations between the still and the moving image’.  The passage of the gallery visitor through the installation mirrors and completes the work.  This theme of human movement is as particularly definitive to our global age as it was to the formation of 20th century Harlem.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004.  She also undertook Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University from 2001-2003.  Hewitt received the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands and, more recently, the 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant.  She is currently in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Leslie Hewitt is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York and is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Hewitt has shown extensively across the US and was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and MoMA’s New Photography exhibition in 2009.  Hewitt’s work has also been shown internationally – notably at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.  Look for Leslie Hewitt’s work in the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City (organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta).  This exhibition is on view 28 March – 11 August 2010.

The Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance will remain at The Kitchen through 20 May 2010.  A discussion between Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, moderated by Rashida Bumbray, will be held Sunday, 9 May at 4.00 pm.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain (2 of 5)", 2006.

The Pew Research Center caused a stir this week when it released a study portraying The Millennials, those who came of age during the first decade of the 21^st Century, as the most even-tempered generation in recent history. Unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, The Millennials have sidestepped almost all reactionary impulses. “They look at themselves and they say, our generation is quite different than our parents’ generation. But they don’t say it with any rancor,” Pew president Andrew Kohut told NPR’s Robert Siegel. “The only thing they criticize the older generation for is their lack of tolerance.”

This sounds suspiciously rosy, even toothless, as though, by some accident of history, a whole generation of non-judgmental diplomats emerged at the exact moment the U.S. entered Iraq. But the Pew study has more bite to it than Kohut suggests. Refusing the spectacle of rebellion that your parent’s generation reveled in is another way of breaking history’s patterns.

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view at the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park, revisits 1968 through the work of African-American artists who grew up in its wake. None of the included artists–most of them belong to last leg of Generation X even though their art-making careers coincided with the rise of the millennium–were cognizant when Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK were shot down or when the Black Panther Party peaked. And none of them pretend to have any precocious insight into  history they didn’t experience. What they do quite well, however, is acknowledge the still-opaque role the past plays in the present.

Hank Willis Thomas, "The Liberation of T.O. I'm not goin back ta' work for massa in dat' darn field," 2003/2005, Lightjet Print.

Hank Willis Thomas‘ stunningly sleek photographs, culled from advertisements and digitally stripped of all text, dominate the  gallery space’s center. All part of Thomas’ Unbranded, the ads originally appeared between 1968 and the present; Willis has been painstakingly moving  through the history of branding, selecting images that portray blackness or target black audiences. The images create a strange visual paradox. They retain the staged melodrama of the initial advertisements yet their deliberate serialization makes them feel like specimens in a study, each something to get close to and pick apart. In Willis’ 2006 rephrasing of a 2004 Peace Corps ad, unambiguously title Don’t Let Them Catch You!, young black children, who might have been from Harlem as easily as Brazil or Niger, leap  into a muddy pool of water as if on the run. A blurry haze covers the whole image, romanticizing the picture’s narrative and recalling too-close-for-comfort episodes in US history in which African-Americans have fled authority. The most disturbing aspect of  Thomas’ images is their ability to cleverly manipulate history’s visual tropes while still living in the realm of glizty glossies that suggest history doesn’t matter.

Leslie Hewitt, "Make it Plain", 2006

Leslie Hewitt’s large-scale photographs and sculpture also reconsider images of the past, but her considerations are more intimate. In the Make it Plain series, Hewitt combines loosely connected historical objects in an attempt to piece together a history different than that of sit-ins, protests and riots. In the second of the five photographs in the series, Hewitt has placed two worn books, representing two divergent perspectives, on a shelf: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the Present and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. An empty frame leans above that and a photo of a ’60s era gathering, flipped on its side, hang above the frame. Another photo of two men hangs on the wall to the right. It’s like an impossible game of connect the dots–the relationship between the objects is buried in a palimpsest of history that only those who have read the books and were there when the photos were taken could decode, and even they might struggle.

In his recent book Timothy, essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg mentions how easy it is to ” walk through the holes” in human perception. It’s hard to overlook the big events, the ones that cause fires, change laws, and are embedded into history books. It’s harder to look between the spectacles and find the threads of truth that have slipped through. Hewitt and Thomas are looking through the holes.

After 1968 continues through March 7th. The exhibition also features work by Deborah Grant, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson, and Otabenga Jones and Associates.

Walead Beshty

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting New Photography 2009, this year’s installment of a series that began in 1985 with the aim of exhibiting the most compelling recent work in the field of contemporary photography.  Organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, the exhibition brings together six young artists, Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek, in a visually diverse body of work.  Most of these artists actively produce work in other media, such as drawing, video, and installation, and each one has an innovative and distinct method of constructing a photograph.  Collectively, these artists investigate the making of a photographic image in the twenty-first century, often utilizing processes of collecting, assembling, or manipulating other images or items.

With the advent of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, photography, long characterized by its ability to capture and represent reality, is again the subject of critical debate. The historical definition of the medium is challenged by the rise of digital capabilities and software programs, which allow photographers to combine their own images with others that are digitally uploaded or scanned.  The abundance of imagery now available at the click of a mouse has led artists towards a deeper analysis of the role of an image within society.  The six artists included in the exhibition create their pictures in a studio or darkroom, investigating the expanded vocabulary of digital processes and its technical and theoretical implications for photography.   The exhibition highlights an epochal moment of transformation for the medium, showcasing the work of artists who critically confront our media saturated world, and open a new era of possibility for photography.  Some works reference traditional techniques of the medium while others are constructed from online images; the works included range from abstract to representational. (more…)