Leslie Hewitt’s hybrid approach to photography and sculpture revisits the still-life genre from a post-minimalist perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallises 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. Whether they are discreetly arranged in layers on wooden planks or stacked before a wall in her studio, her objects often include personal mementos such as familial pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines referring to Black literary and popular culture ephemera of her upbringing. Interested in the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory, she decisively challenges both by unfolding manifestly formal rather than didactic connections in her heteroclite juxtapositions. She puts pressure on physical space as the ultimate frame of her photo-sculptures, by displaying some of them leaning against a wall as they were originally conceived, Leslie Hewitt further works with site-specific installation and film as modalities to contend with the notion of space and time equally.
