Helen Westergren - Weekly Artist Post

Leslie Hewitt

I was lucky enough to hear Leslie Hewitt give a talk earlier this week and her approach to photography really struck a chord with me. Hewitt is an artist who actively exploits the idea of image as object, studying the relationships between objects on the picture plane as well as in the gallery. Heavily influenced by minimalist theories, her work is a true advocate for a sparse economy of elements. There are sometimes only two or three objects within her compositions that she than prints and leans against gallery walls in heavy wooden frames. In her collage series "Riffs on Real Time" she used found images, not her own, along with books and other sketches and writings to create narratives between objects in a plane. Some of her work is less technically strong, most likely because she is not explicitly trained as a photographer. Nevertheless her still, and more recently, moving images, show an attention to small details and highlight the relationships we hold with our histories.
Much of Hewitt's found imagery comes from the Civil Rights era, a time she did not herself experience but still feels the repercussions of today. The family photos she uses are also not her own, primarily because she wants to evoke the universal feel of familial relationship instead of a one pointed towards herself. These found photos are the primary influences of her compositions, but also give her a starting point for other, dimensional work. When listening to Hewitt, she underscored the importance for her of working through ideas and concepts through a variety of mediums. Much of her interests likes at the conjuncture of these relationships, or when she combines the different things she has learned working through ideas in different ways. For example, with "Riffs on Real Time" she presents a collection of 20+ photographs, but also some significant architectural interventions that express the same questions the photographs do with a different language.
My primary interest in Hewitt's work is her method of making and her need to work through ideas in many different ways, mostly because I too have this compulsion. She lies at the intersection of two fields that I often find myself in because of what I am studying and it was amazing to speak with another artist who is dealing with these converging ideas.