Leslie Hewitt

Hewitt's exhibition featured a collection of 10 highly stylized photographs from an ongoing series started in 2002. Shown together for the first time by the same name in a sleek installation, Untitled, 2011. Described as "postmodern takes on the still life", Riffs on Real Time is an exploration of how the juxtaposition of different materials can comprise a cultural identity. Created from 2002–2009, a primary image, usually culled from the American media and sociopolitical in bent, is centrally placed on a larger book, photo, or other document so that the image appears framed; in turn, this arrangement is photographed laid out on a hardwood or carpeted floor, which adds yet another frame.[4] "Hewitt operates within an unvarying compositional structure. Each image includes a document showing clear evidence of use—perhaps a book with worn corners, a magazine folded open to a particular page, or a sheet of paper with inscrutable writing. On top of this document a snapshot of American life is placed. These layered constructions are arranged and photographed directly on the floor, which serves as a literal ground for the composition. Whether soft, grainy wood or richly textured domestic carpet, this ground speaks to the interior nature of Hewitt’s work and its metaphoric and physical location within the built spaces of human con- struction and occupation."[19] Also, riffing on the premise of "same but different" was the photo installation Untitled, in which a large starch-white slab was propped against the wall, scaled to the dimensions of the gallery's doorway. Here, Hewitt's iconography and conceptual choices echoed her previous work, as she insinuated this particular offering into the material legacies of the 1960s and 1970s.This exhibition confirms Hewitt's rightful place among a generation of artists confronting the historical legacies of the 1960s through an amalgamation of artistic strategies that test the premises of photography.[20] It also raises the perplexing issue of what happens when formerly radical strategies have been tamed and naturalized into a generational style.[21]

"Hewitt’s work has been said to pose questions about ‘the conundrum of the past and its connection to the contemporary moment.’ In Midday [2009], Hewitt’s latest series, a mandarin orange sits next to a copy of Manchild in the Promised Land, a nearly autobiographical account of the challenges of urban life for African Americans in 1950s New York. As with Hewitt’s earlier works, elements from the past are placed in relationship to more recent photographs, and thereby introduced into a contemporary context."[22]

The exhibition at the Menil Collection, 'Untitled (Structures),' (2013) was a collaboration with cinematographer Bradford Young and producer Karen Chien. Untitled is a series of short silent film vignettes created in 2012.[23] The films include footage from 2010 – 2012 of locations where iconic civil rights photographs were taken in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago, Memphis, and parts of Arkansas, which were all palpably transformed by the Great Migration. "Individual frames span 15 to 24 seconds and center around single details isolated from the archival images—a black body bent, a crack in the white marble stairs—that are then “restaged” and filmed on the same consecrated grounds."[24] The works are 35mm film transferred to HD video, dual-channel video installation. In an Artforum interview, Hewitt says of the dual-channel video projection: "You can decide to look at one or the other, but your eyes have to contend with both."[25] “Hewitt draws the tradition of the still life and combines it with the camera's ability to “shift the view of the world and hold it still.”[26]

In 2013, Hewitt released a series of photographs that were displayed at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. within tilted maple box-frames, that brings into focus the morphing of images in a studio into object-like artworks shown in a gallery. In Untitled (Perception), 2013, the block of maple that rests on a stack of three books, the only identifiable one being a collection of James Baldwin's essays, matches the work's wooden frame. Also nearby was an untitled work comprising two free-floating walls leaning against the gallery architecture. These minimalist objects are made of drywall and wood and were modeled on the texture and size of the gallery walls. They assert a content-free physicality that harmonized with the rest of the exhibition's pictorial and physical material.[27]