Through a practice spanning photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation, Leslie Hewitt interrogates contemporary constructions of time, memory, and meaning. She is best known for works that explore slippages between the personal and the sociopolitical by engaging with and often deconstructing postminimalist forms.

The Daylight/Daylong series reflects research the artist conducted while in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Each work features two adjacent photographs: The left side captures a radiant sunrise or sunset illuminating the west Texas horizon, while the right side presents an abstracted representation of artist Dan Flavin’s 1996 light installation, Untitled (Marfa Project). The geometric bands of color echo the sensation of viewing the fluorescent tubes Flavin specified to create his immersive, site-specific work for Marfa. The resulting manmade ultraviolet light can have a sensorial and psychological influence on the viewer, akin to the experience of observing a West Texas sunset. 

The custom wood frames were designed by the artist to tilt away from the wall at unexpected angles. Their sculptural quality encourages the viewer to examine the works from diverse positions, while potentially inviting reconsideration of their own perspective. The interplay between disparate images combined with the asymmetric frames embodies Hewitt’s fascination with light and form, past and present, time and space.

About the artist: Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977, New York, NY) earned a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and the Yale University School of Art in 2000, and studied at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She graduated with an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2004. Hewitt has received numerous awards, including the Anonymous Was A Woman award in 2022, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2020, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2014. 

Hewitt’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2023), Dia Bridgehampton, Bridgehampton, NY (2022), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2016), the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2016), the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2016), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, (2012), the Menil Collection, Houston (2012), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008), among many others.

Hewitt has held residencies at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, among others. Hewitt is an Associate Professor of art at Rice University and lives and works between Houston and New York City.