Leslie Hewitt

Leslie Hewitt

Rujeko Hockley

PICTURES

All photographs from Riffs on Real Time, 2013. Opposite: (10 of 10). Overleaf: (3 of 10); (9 of 10). Pages 114-15: (2 of 10); (7 of 10)

For over a decade, Leslie Hewitt has been riffing on photography’s "real” time, layering image and repeating form. Her practice, though rooted in photography, expands beyond any strict or bounded understanding of that medium to include sculpture, moving images, and site-specific installation. In the riffs in question—Riffs on Real Time (2013)— she detaches personal ephemera from original context. Notably, she accomplishes this without making that ephemera impersonal, or herself impartial. Instead, she tenderly creates empathie archaeologists of her viewers, encouraging us to look, sifting and mining the signs left behind in faded snapshots and bentcornered magazines.

Procedurally, Hewitt works in strata, placing a photograph of that uniquely recognizable vintage dimension atop a rectangular book or magazine or single piece of paper atop a deliciously textured or colored rectangle of floor. Following this carefully considered process of framing and arrangement, she photographs the result, in the process rephotog raphing-ref raming -the private moments of unknown others, and, perhaps, how those others are seen. These others, black people, most likely American, are seen living their lives: photographing themselves, for themselves.

Though still and quietly imbued with gravitas, Hewitt's images exceed the genre of still life. Somewhere between time capsule and meticulously arranged family album, her Riffs on Real Time are always both image and object. Their palpable heft comes from their affecting and relatable visual content, to be surethe children's birthday parties, the proud families posed in front of a new car or house, the fly girls with their hips cocked just so-but also from the physicality of the layering itself. One thing added to another, and then to another, creates a more accurate and illuminating whole. Which is to say, it's not enough to see a snapshot of a family or person or suburban home (Hewitt does place us in the suburbs, almost always) caught for one moment of life. More likely one needs a discarded and long-forgotten school assignment or memo, replete with doodled marginalia. One needs a carefully removed pagesharp, clean edges with ninety-degree corners-from a magazine, discussing Cambodia and the 1970 Kent State massacre. One needs a full magazine, folded to the pertinent page. Sometimes one needs the deep navy blue of a cloth bound book, content and title irrelevant, or the pale, wavy grain of a red hardwood floor.

These fragmentary combinations are imaginative assemblage, neither factual nor necessarily desirous of facticity. Instead, they are transporting, poetically moving us out of our now and into the then of the original captured moment. Hewitt's works create a multilayered composite of the political, the personal, and the social, more true to the ways in which we each experience our lives and histories, inseparably and in real time.

Rujeko Hockleyis Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.