{"id":260502,"date":"2010-02-01T17:04:16","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T22:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=36190"},"modified":"2010-02-01T17:04:16","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T22:04:16","slug":"sculptural-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/260502","title":{"rendered":"Sculptural photos"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City artist Leslie Hewitt<\/a>, a Radcliffe<\/a> Fellow this year, first trained as a sculptor. But she has since brought the heft and dimensionality of that medium to photography.<\/p>\n

Hewitt\u2019s stark, evocative photographs \u2014 composed like still lifes \u2014 have been called \u201cphotosculptural.\u201d For one thing, some of her pieces match the scale of a public sculpture. They measure 5 feet by 7 feet. Instead of being hung, they are displayed leaning heavily against gallery walls. Other pieces are smaller-scale photographs, composed in layers that evoke the physicality of the pictured objects.<\/p>\n

\u201cRiffs on Real Time<\/a>,\u201d for example, is a 10-photo series that saw two earlier iterations, starting in 2002. It is on display at Byerly Hall through Feb. 25. They are modest in size and wall-mounted, yet still suggest the weightiness of sculpture.<\/p>\n

In a lecture at the Radcliffe Gymnasium Jan. 27, Hewitt talked about breaking photography\u2019s liminal conventions, which is a way to take the art\u2019s framed flatness and fill it out with a kind of illusory heft.<\/p>\n

On display, she said, her work emphasizes \u201cboth the visual and the physical experience\u201d of photography, capturing both \u201cthe illusion of photography and the undeniable physical presence of objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within her photos are collagelike collections of what she called \u201cthe residue of mass culture,\u201d including old books, forgotten films, amateur snapshots, tearsheets from newspapers and magazines. \u201cI have the impulse to archive,\u201d said Hewitt, who is captivated by history and its resonant artifacts.<\/p>\n

She is also taken by the power of everyday objects that, when arranged in startling ways, acquire transformative power.<\/p>\n

Hewitt, the child of parents involved in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, is also the grandchild of people caught up in the great migration of blacks northward in the 1930s. She described growing up in a house full of books meant to change the world. Her work carries the sense that artifacts from the past have the power to ignite present-day political insights.<\/p>\n

Two 1968 books on racial justice appear as props in \u201cMake It Plain,\u201d a series of five large-scale photographs included in Hewitt\u2019s lecture and slideshow. Three were shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial and are still the objects of conversation, said Lucien Terras, who \u00a0co-directs the D\u2019Amelio Terras Gallery<\/a> in Manhattan\u2019s Chelsea district, which displays the young Hewitt\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Hewitt is a self-confessed stickler for how her photographs are grouped in a show, but she admits they have a life apart from one another afterward.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have one on my living room wall,\u201d said Terras, \u201cand I enjoy it on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with her archival urge, Hewitt uses the assemblages within her photographs to grapple with what she called \u201cthe slippery process of memory,\u201d a quality of mind she described as sometimes blurring the boundary between individual and collective recollections.<\/p>\n

The composite nature of each piece is also meant to \u201cslow down the process of looking,\u201d said Hewitt.<\/p>\n

To gain insight into the interchange between art and art watcher, she used part of her first semester at Radcliffe to study perspective, the history of optics, and the language of early photography. (Helping her was research assistant Amy Yoshitsu \u201910, a concentrator in visual and environmental studies.)<\/p>\n

Slowing down the viewing process is possible in \u201cRiffs on Real Time,\u201d in part because of the layered nature of the photographs.<\/p>\n

At the center of many artworks is a small snapshot, a \u201cvernacular\u201d form of the photographic medium that Hewitt said captures the resonance that memories can have. One is a faded color snapshot from the 1964 World\u2019s Fair. Another shows a black man in shorts standing by a barbeque grill.<\/p>\n

Then comes a second layer in the pieces, one meant to \u201copen the aperture of vision,\u201d said Hewitt. They include scrawls from a notebook, inked doodles, old magazine text, and similar elements. \u201cMementos and personal documents\u201d like these, she said, help to draw out \u201can intimate engagement with the viewer.\u201d<\/p>\n

That intimate engagement is important to Hewitt, who compared the photograph to a window. Her layered pictures take the framing aspect of a photo, she said, and repeat it like \u201ca series of windows in succession.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cRiffs on Real Time,\u201d the last and outer layer of the pictures is the floor of her studio, where the photo assemblages are composed. This creates an outer frame of worn and scarred wood, shiny with shellac. The flooring is weighty and physical, and adds to the sculptural quality of the photographs.<\/p>\n

In her large-scale floor pieces like \u201cMake It Plain,\u201d Hewitt refuses to use glass, considering it a barrier in the engagement between viewer and artwork. The photographs are mounted on aluminum, as they lean unsecured within the custom wooden frames.<\/p>\n

The constructed arrangements of these big pieces \u201coperate like words in a sentence,\u201d said Hewitt, in a juxtaposition of the mundane (such as the snapshots) and the politically resonant (such as books from the 1960s). The point is to wrestle \u201cnew meaning out of everyday materials,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Sometimes those everyday materials are windows onto the way that we use things. During a fellowship in the Netherlands, Hewitt studied 17th century Dutch masters and the objects they gathered for their still lifes.<\/p>\n

There were evocations of death and the temporality of life, she said, repeating what critics often say. But the still lifes also showed consumption patterns as well as an early celebration of capitalism, including the dark side of trade. She showed a 1670 still life by Juriaen van Streeck that displays, among other \u201cgoods,\u201d a Moorish slave.<\/p>\n

A similar engagement with objects marks our present age of global capitalism, said Hewitt, who is trying to revive the idea of what she called \u201cpictorial sculptures.\u201d Along the way, she acknowledged a paradox in \u201cthe inability of photographs to show materiality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hewitt called each of her composite photographs, \u201ca quiet history of sorts,\u201d and an attempt not only to create a new \u201clanguage\u201d for photography but the possibility that pictures might be a way \u201cfor engaging [with] radical historical material.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond history and artifacts and the impulse to archive, of course, Hewitt said the uncanny mystery of art remains, even to the artist. \u201cThere is this desire for more,\u201d she said, \u201cbeyond what we already know.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York City artist Leslie Hewitt, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, first trained as a sculptor. But she has since brought the heft and dimensionality of that medium to photography. Hewitt\u2019s stark, evocative photographs \u2014 composed like still lifes \u2014 have been called \u201cphotosculptural.\u201d For one thing, some of her pieces match the scale of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}