Until August 1, 2016, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY
Leslie Hewitt: Collective Stance
Leslie Hewitt in collaboration with cinematographer Bradford Young, Untitled (Structures), 2012. Production still.
All images Collective Stance, 2016.
About:
SculptureCenter is pleased to present an exhibition titled Collective Stance featuring new and recent work by artist Leslie Hewitt. The exhibition will be on view May 1 – August 1, 2016 and will include two film installations along with recent sculpture and lithographs. Both film installations were created in collaboration with renowned cinematographer Bradford Young and will have their New York premieres.
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 (2010–2012) 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 (Where Paths Meet, Turn Away, Then Align Again) (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.
Leslie Hewitt (born in Saint Albans, NY in 1977) received her BFA from The Cooper Union, studied Africana/Cultural Studies at New York University and graduated with an MFA from Yale University. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014); Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2013); the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2012); Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2012); The Menil Collection, Houston (2012); Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2012); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2010); The Kitchen, New York (2010); the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2009); and LA><ART, Los Angeles (2006). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions internationally including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012). Hewitt has also participated in several biennials including the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden (2015) and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York. Leslie Hewitt lives and works in New York City.
Bradford Marcel Young (born in Louisville, KY in 1977), award-winning cinematographer, created a three-channel video installation titled Bynum Cutler (2014) inspired by late playwright August Wilson, installed with Creative Time’s Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn (2014). Young studied film at Howard University, where he was influenced by Haile Gerima. He was Director of Photography on the feature films White Lies, Black Sheep (2007), Pariah (2011), Restless City (2011), Middle of Nowhere (2012), Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), and Mother of George (2013). He has won Cinematography Awards at the Sundance Film Festival twice: in 2011, for his work on Pariah, and in 2013 for his work on both Mother of George and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Young’s collaborations with artist Leslie Hewitt have been exhibited at The Kitchen, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Menil Collection, Des Moines Art Center, the MCA Chicago, and Lofoten International Arts Festival, Norway. Young is currently Director of Photography on J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, and recently finished shooting on Ed Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice.
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.
(text Sculpture Center)