LESLIE HEWITT: NEW WAVES

Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to announce artist Leslie Hewitt’s solo presentation New Waves.

November 16, 2024 – January 25, 2025

Leslie Hewitt’s photographs turn our perceptual assumptions about viewing upside down—or perhaps more accurately, they quite literally ground perception with the force of gravity. In her self-described still life photographs, a series Hewitt has been making since 2004, chromogenic prints rest inside of custom-made frames, which are placed on the floor and leaned against a wall. Encountering these works requires a full body act of looking, a physical experience that slows down perception.

Gravity, and a slowing of perception, also come into play within the depicted space of Hewitt’s photographs. If concepts like floor, and lean, are central to the artworks as physical objects, they also figure prominently within the still life scenes Hewitt presents us with. In Untitled (Maddened by Love), 2019, for example, a neatly stacked pile of five books rests on the floor, pushed up against a wall. On top of this stack of books is placed a rectangular—just slightly wide of square—plank of elm wood, its flat surface facing us as it leans against the wall of the space within the photograph.

The gravity and lean that govern Hewitt’s artwork-as-object are repeated by the gravity and lean of the wooden plank—a subtle play on the visual and literary device of mise-en-abyme (literal translation: “placed into the abyss”), of an image within an image. In Untitled (Maddened by Love) there is yet another image within an image, a photo placed carefully at the top of the wood plank and stacked books arrangement. One can just make out what appears to be three figures set against an expanse of sky and sea, an anonymous snapshot marking a moment in place and time.

Much like the reaction that occurs when atoms crash into each other, Hewitt’s colliding bodies of work generate their own transfer of energy: waves that reverberate through space and time, and into the future.