Leslie Hewitt: Collective Stance

SculptureCenter presents an exhibition titled Collective Stance featuring new and recent work by artist Leslie Hewitt. The exhibition includes two film installations along with recent sculpture and lithographs. Both film installations, which are premiering in New York at SculptureCenter, were created in collaboration with renowned cinematographer Bradford Young.

Untitled (Structures) (2012) is a two-channel film installation inspired by an archive of civil rights-era photographs housed at the Menil Collection in Houston. Originally commissioned by the Menil Collection, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Untitled (Structures) presents a series of silent vignettes shot at locations in Chicago, Memphis, and the Arkansas Delta; places that were profoundly impacted by the Great Migration and by the civil rights movement. The installation poses critical questions of the historicity of the archive and photojournalistic modes. Hewitt and Young's close examination of such matters through the exploration of architecture, still photography, and body memory, move away from nostalgia and re-enactment as conventions. Through the assertion of the work's contemporaneity, Hewitt and Young's project explores temporality, exposing the tension between still photography and the cinematic experiences of moving images, between the past and the present, between the physical and the psychological. A new film installation, Stills (2015), incorporating footage from their shoots (2010–12) will debut which furthers Hewitt and Young's nuanced and structural approach.

Hewitt frequently pushes the limits of form to take on multiple meanings and considerations, from individual and collective relationships to memory, history, and, ultimately, time. Her compositions often comprise fragments that produce the possibility of both seeing and experiencing in unexpected ways.

Hewitt's installation Untitled (2012) is a series of steel sculptures presented alongside photolithographs. These white, industrially-made sculptures echo architectural forms and fragments inviting viewers to consider alternate perspectives and orientations in space. The photolithographs are prints representing small details of historic photographs. The process of photolithography is most often associated with the production of circuit boards and microprocessors. Hewitt's use of the process produces ravishing prints that generate a tension between light and shadow, positive and negative space, but also between pattern, surface, and the representational image.

Throughout the exhibition, Hewitt invites viewers to consider space through sculpture and image, illusion, and form, and through the multiplicity of temporal experiences that hover in and around contemporary life.

The exhibition is curated by SculptureCenter Executive Director and Chief Curator Mary Ceruti and is co-produced with The Power Plant in Toronto. SculptureCenter is co-publishing with The Power Plant and Dancing Foxes, a book that considers the themes developed in the film installations.