Leslie Hewitt
July 2009
Hewitt’s work has quickly gained a reputation for power, elegance, and beauty as she uses photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations to explore fluid notions of time. In her hands, the camera becomes a tool that subtly disrupts the window effect and expectations of a photographic document. In still-life tableaux and installations, she uses snapshots, ephemera, and the residue of mass culture to reconsider the role history plays in our contemporary situation and collective consciousness. During her time in Syracuse, Hewitt is doing research for a series of photograph that are informed by 17th-century vanitas paintings, making scans with the Immacon, and producing large-format digital prints.
Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow for Africana/Cultural Studies. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibition venues includes the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Artists Space in New York; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA>