Jeff Sonhouse. Installation view (from left to right): "Papi Shampoo," Mixed media and oil on fiberboard; "Mateo Manhood aka Buzz Kill," Oil on fiberboard; "Decompositioning," Mixed media and oil on fiberboard; 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

Leslie Hewitt’s Grounded is a staircase that goes nowhere. I saw it at the California African American Museum last winter in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, a show about the ripples of the year a jailed Huey P. Newton said “we’re hoping the master dies” and Joan Didion experienced socio-politically induced “nausea and vertigo.” All artists included were born in the last 42 years, after 1968.

Because I walked between the wall label and Hewitt’s sculpture twice, the gallery attendant asked if I understood the art. Caught off guard, I asked, “Do you?”

She said she did, then told me what was more or less a parable: back in the ‘60s, my father and hers might have worked for the same company, lived in company houses, and been offered tools to refine these houses. To get their tools, they might’ve stood in lines, my father in the “whites only” line, hers in the line for black employees. Mine might have gotten one set of tools, hers another. Her father’s wouldn’t have fit together correctly and he might have complained to the bosses, but they would have shrugged, and said, “Those black people never get it right.” Then he would have done what he could, building the pyramid-like, non-functional staircase with its angled railing.

Though weirdly precise, this story sidesteps one key fact: Hewitt’s Grounded is the work of someone who wields the “wrong” tools like a pro. It turns non-functionality into a cool exercise in stylish lyricism, a way to control the way you’re being controlled and an f*** you to the powers that be.

Jeff Sonhouse, "Mateo Manhood aka Buzz Kill," Oil on fiberboard, 16 x 13 ¼ inches, 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

Jeff Sonhouse’s paintings are stylishly controlled, too. On view at Martha Otero Gallery, the cameos of masked men indulge in pattern and texture. The subject of Gravity’s Lawlessness, for instance, wears a lemon and ultramarine diamond print suit, with neck and face masked to match. In Maskulinity Resuscitated, the subject has steel wool curls, and wears pinstripes and oversized cream-colored medallions that fall past the painting’s edge. All the other figures stay within their designated rectangles, however. They’re posed head-on like Van Eyck’s and their dandyism feels like it’s festering on the panel surfaces.

This is Sonhouse’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, surprising since his debut at New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery took place eight years ago, but also fitting. His work has a New York ethos. His men could live in Brownstones and feel at home wandering through the frames of Looking for Langston (if the film were in full color, that is). The show’s title, “Better off Dead,” said the Landlord, has a New York feel to it as well. It’s hierarchical and violent but also vague.

Jeff Sonhouse, "Our Savior," Oil, gouache, watercolor, matches on paper, 22 ½ x 14 inches, 2010. Courtesy Martha Otero.

The eyes of the figures, peeking out of their various masks (or anti-peeking, in the case of Papi Shampoo, who has mirrors in his sockets) are opaque in a way that feels like refusal, maybe a refusal to acknowledge to the amorphous “Landlord” but more likely a refusal to acknowledge vulnerability of any sort.

There’s a Jesus motif in the show,  but it’s not Papi Shampoo with his purple cloak and Nazarene-worthy hair or the protagonist of Decomposition with his large, shepherding hands that play the role of the deliverer. In Our Savior, a small work on paper, a slight man stares out of a rough-cut geometric mask with eyes that are warmer than those of the other figures. The matches that make up his hair leave a halo of soot around his head. He’s turned the “tools” of convention–suits, squares, matches–into vehicles for passive aggression and seems to be toying with letting go of his “stylish control.”  Maybe he’ll self-combust, or lurch forward off the picture plane. If he does, the tension that holds Sonhouse’s show together would collapse, and it’s hard to predict what would happen next.

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.

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.

Leslie Hewitt

The monumental polychromatic photographs of Walead Beshty (b. 1976) dispense with specific content and outlying subject matter entirely, instead reflecting the technical and historical means of image production.  At a time when chemical photography is slipping into obsolescence, Beshty works completely without the use of a camera in the secluded space of a darkroom, removed from the outside world.  His psychedelic photograms, such as Three Color Curl (2008), result from exposing the sensitive material surface of the photograph to a range of various light sources and chemical applications.  Portions of photographic paper are exposed multiple times to cyan, magenta, and yellow lights.  Since the exposure process must take place in total darkness, a set of closed operations are administered, but largely left to chance, in the creation of these spectral compositions.  The surfaces of the photograms are treated as objects in themselves, released from the role of description.  Beshty pares down the photographic machinery in the creation of self-reflexive works that record the event, or the surrounding conditions, of their own production.  Beshty began employing this evidentiary photographic process after a trip to Berlin in 2006, where he took several conventional documentary shots of the unoccupied Iraqi embassy.  Upon crossing the border on his return to the United States, Beshty’s undeveloped film was accidentally exposed during the security scanning process, producing warm vermillion washes over the otherwise static architectural compositions.  The element of chance and its creation of non-referential, but highly indexical, information characterizes all of the artist’s subsequent work. Each Three Color Curl is the outcome of the direct manipulation of photographic elements.

Daniel Gordon

For other artists in the exhibition, the photographic image is the end result of a creative endeavor that begins with sculpture or collage.  The photographs exhibited by Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) represent the final stage of a process that starts with the construction of life-size figurative sculptures made from cut paper and other images, often culled from the internet.  In an interview conducted by DailyServing earlier this year, Gordon describes his pictures as “a collaboration between me and everybody on the internet.”  Using online search terms such as ‘skin’, the artist compiles image results to use in the fabrication of his three-dimensional temporary collages that are then photographed.  Produced entirely within his Dumbo, Brooklyn studio, the crude figurative sculptures (often female) depict bizarre and sometimes unsettling situations; detached objects and anatomical parts mingle and merge with one other to form grotesquely appealing images, such as Red Headed Woman (2008).  Gordon’s photosculptures exist somewhere between two and three dimensions, visually interrupted by his disjunctive cuts which recall the photomontages of the Dadaists.

Sara VanDerBeek

Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976), daughter of experimental filmmaker and animator Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), takes a similar approach to image making, appropriating current and historical photographs from various sources, including newspapers and exhibition catalogues.  She then creates temporary structures that exist only to be photographed.  A Composition for Detroit (2009), a multipart photographic work consisting of four panels, reflects the country’s current economic situation by exploring the state of postindustrial cities.  Media photographs from the 1967 Detroit riots as well as a Depression-era photograph by Walker Evans are symbolic markers in this cultural commentary.  Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977) combines personal and historic narratives within her photographs, examining how nostalgia and cultural meaning can be held within an image.  Hewitt meticulously composes and then photographs still life arrangements of personal artifacts, such as family snapshots or the 30^th anniversary issue of Ebony, placing them with historic relics from the civil rights era.  In two of the works exhibited, Hewitt turns the orientation of the photograph upside down, causing visual tension for the viewer.

Carter Mull

Works exhibited by Carter Mull (b. 1977) include Los Angeles Times Tuesday, August 5, 2008 and Los Angeles Times Monday, February 23, 2009, for which the artist photographed the front cover of the L.A. Times, his local newspaper, and at least two pictures responding to that page, and manipulated them using both digital and analog techniques.  Mull draws attention to the parallel between the transformation of photography and print media in the digital age with his vibrant and often patterned prints.

Sterling Ruby’s (b. 1972) digitally constructed photographic collages on display at MoMA, Artaud (2007) and Animal (2009) are based on graffiti found in the Cinque Terre region of Italy and in Venice, respectively.  Ruby took pictures of existing graffiti and digitally manipulated these photographs by adding his own painterly touches with Photoshop, resulting in rich and complex layers of imagery.

The six artists included in New Photography 2009 are expanding the medium by introducing new ways of working with an image, whether referencing traditional techniques or exploiting the proliferation of images in our media saturated world.  Beshty, Gordon, Hewitt, Mull, Ruby, and VanDerBeek are blurring the lines of photography with other disciplines as they participate in the lively debate on the nature of photography in the twenty-first century.

New Photography 2009 will remain on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery on the third floor of MoMA until January 11, 2010.