Hewitt began working on Rough Cuts, a suite of collages, in late March of 2020. Working with found paper, the collages are evocative, minimalist works that are both constructive and deconstructive. They are made using a monotype printmaking process to create geometric compositions alongside cuts into the paper. Both techniques actively edit the classification logics found on the original page, opening each page to a larger system of breaks and edits. 

Reading Room: Forty-two is a text-based html programmed moving-image work, exploring the intersection of concrete poetry and what Arjun Appadurai would call a “technoscape.” This “technoscape” appears as a continuous scroll of words that Hewitt collected while researching the National Memorial African Bookstore. The title references the forty-two years that Lewis Michaux operated the National Memorial African Bookstore, from 1932 to 1974, in Harlem, New York. The words themselves come from books visible in archival photos of the shop, as well as Hewitt’s own thoughts while conducting this research. She worked with programmers to build a machine that would arrange and rearrange words in an open grid with interludes of visual code.

Leslie Hewitt‘s approach to photography and sculpture reimagines the art historical still life genre from a post-minimalist perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through
the disciplines of photography and film theory, respectively, are spare assemblages of ordinary effects and materials, suggesting the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical histories. Interested in the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory, she decisively challenges both by unfolding manifestly formal, rather than didactic, connections. Her distinct play on syncopation and juxtaposition make her work discursive and beautifully layered. Hewitt further works with site-specific installation, autonomous sculptures, drawings and the moving image as modalities to contend equally with shifting notions of space and time.

Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Konstepidemin in Göteborg, Sweden and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.

Image 1: Leslie Hewitt, Untitled, 2020, monoprint, framed: 53.3 × 40.6cm, unique. Photo Credit: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Image 2: Leslie Hewitt, Reading Room: Forty-two, 2019, 42 minute long technoscape film, edition 1/3. Photo Credit: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

We would like to thank Perrotin Gallery, New York for their support of this project.