PRESS RELEASE
January 18 to March 10, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 18, 6-8 PM
Participating artists:
Terence Gower & Pedro Reyes, David Maljkovic, Kirsten Pieroth, Pablo Pijnappel,
Falke Pisano, Pia Rönicke, Tina Schulz, Jamie Shovlin, Kerry Tribe, and
Mario Garcia Torres.
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer
An illustrated catalogue will be published for the exhibition
Elephant Cemetery is an exhibition about objects and our relationship to them; it is about public space, and the art often found there; and it is about the mechanisms we devise when the object is missing and we are faced with its void. Originally, it was conceived as an exhibition about sculpture in a stricter sense; about the roles presence and absence might play as generators of meaning, and how they might become interchangeable in our perception; it was to be an exhibition about formal concerns, about the ways in which positive and negative volumes are essential sculptural terms. But over time, the hollow and the solid, positive and negative space, came to be understood not just as inert physical states, as descriptions of an object’s protrusions and recessions, but also metaphorically, as an expanded notion of sculpture in relation to its surrounding and its audience. It thus became an exhibition about exaggerated states of presence and absence, about formal languages of monumentality and operations of memory as forces in aesthetic production. Such an understanding of these terms aims to keep at bay an immediate turn to sculpture’s often commemorative roles in war memorials, public sites of remembrance, and other forms of (mainly secular) historic signification. And such an understanding pronounces the languages of monumentality and memory as separate, rather than joined and bounded by the function of meaning production. Instead of focusing on sculpture’s meaning, this exhibition is about our role it its deciphering, about human scale and the human need to remember. Bringing together eleven international artists working in all media, Elephant Cemetery takes stock of the ways in which we engage with sculpture, how scale can trigger memories, and how a memory might serve as a starting point for a renewed engagement with objects.
PROJECT SPACE: Replica of a Lost Original
Leslie Hewitt
with a contribution by Rose Olu Ronke Ojo
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer
“Snapshots, ephemera, oral stories pasted down, official and unofficial biographies left on bookshelves, found letters and mementos of sorts, suspended in time for constant reconsideration of moments pregnant with political and social agency,” are the raw material for Leslie Hewitt’s photographs and installations, in which she is stripping away the density of mediated culture, sifting through misrepresentations of genuine ideals. Hewitt quite literally builds on the idea of protest, of flux, of change, of revolution and creates structures which capture temporary manifestations of subjectivity, and which may last an instant or a long time. For Replica of a Lost Original, her first solo exhibition in New York, Hewitt brings together one work from her previous photographic series Make It Plain, as well as several new works produced specifically for this exhibition, including a collaboration with the young writer and scholar Rose Olu Ronke Ojo.
Leslie
Hewitt is a second-year resident at the Core Program in Houston, Texas.
She received her MFA from Yale University in 2004 and her BFA from the Cooper
Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2000. She was a Clark Foundation
fellow and attended New York University studying Africana Studies, 2001-2003.
Hewitt has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, the Studio
Museum in Harlem, New York, the Sculpture Center, New York, the Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford and LAXART, Los Angeles.