Monthly Archives: April 2013

Leslie Hewitt’s photographs rest in sturdy wooden frames that lean against the wall and invite viewers to experience a unique space between photography and sculpture. Her work combines still life compositions comprised of political, social, and personal materials, which result in multiple histories seen embedded in sculptural, architectural, and abstract forms. Mundane objects and structures open into complex systems of knowledge. This perceptual slippage is what attracts Hewitt to both the illusions of film (still and moving photography) and the undeniable presence of physical objects (sculpture). Exploring this as an artist and not as a historiographer, Hewitt draws parallels between the formal appearance of things and their significance to collective history and political consciousness in contemporary art. In her lecture, Hewitt will discuss the development of her practice and recent collaborations.

Leslie Hewitt is an artist living in New York City. She graduated from The Cooper Union’s School of Art in 2000 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. From 2001-2003, she studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University. Hewitt has displayed her work in exhibitions in a number of American and international galleries, and her work is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, the Yale Art Gallery, among others. Hewitt was represented in MoMA’s New Photography 2009, a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. In 2010, she received the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant and Joyce Alexander Wein Prize. Hewitt has held residencies at 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 amongst others.

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Leslie Hewitt

Leslie Hewitt artforum.com / 500 words 

Leslie Hewitt – Sikkema Jenkins

Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.

Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.

Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and America. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was made a Royal Academician and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. During the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, Emin’s survey exhibition ’20 Years’ opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and then toured on to Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (March 19th – June 21st 2009). In May 2011, Emin had a major solo exhibition at the Hayward, London. Emin currently lives and works in London.

More information can be found here:

Love Is What You Want

Tracey Emin Studio

Tracey Emin Hearts Times Square

Mary Reid Kelley was born in South Carolina in 1979. She studied Art and Women’s Studies at St. Olaf College and received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2009. The videos she makes in collaboration with her husband, artist Patrick Kelley, have been shown in New York, Los Angeles, and London. Other exhibitions include The Wexner Center for the Arts (2012); Bard CCS (2012), MACRO Rome (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010); and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010). Mary and Patrick completed a commissioned video for the 2010 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, The Dissolve. In August 2013 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will present an exhibition of the video work.

An interest in language, literature and history informs their work, which combines video, poetry, animation, performance, and painting. The videos have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, and Art in America. The making of The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011) was documented in Season Six of Art21, episode “History”. From 2011 to 2012 Mary and Patrick resided at the American Academy in Rome, and now live in upstate New York.

More information can be found here:

http://maryreidkelley.com/

Art 21: Mary Reid Kelley: “You Make Me Iliad” 

Finding the Reason in Mary Reid Kelley’s Mad Rhymes About French History

Filmmaker, theorist, and author Hito Steyerl examines pop culture, social issues, and gender politics through the moving image. Her work is highly self-referential; Steyerl is adamant that one must understand his or her own role in social issues before exploring such topics artistically. As a result, she is often featured in many of her works. Drawing inspiration from her dual heritage, Steyerl is greatly influenced by both German and Japanese avant-garde film. In addition to solo exhibitions throughout Europe, Steyerl’s work has been included in numerous art shows including the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2004), Manifesta 5 (2004), dOCUMENTA (12) (2007) and the Shanghai Biennale (2008), among others.  Recent solo exhibitions include Hito Steyerl, e-flux, New York, 2011 and focus: Hito Steyerl, The Art Institute Chicago, 2012−2013.  A collection of her essays is recently published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).  Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy, currently serves as a professor for media arts at the University of Arts Berlin and has taught film theory at both Goldsmith College and Bard College.

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

More information can be found here:

Making: Hito Steyerl [Is the musem a battlefield?] at the 2012 Creative Time Summit (video)

NYTimes: Memorials, Along With Some Mischief Hito Steyerl Has New York Solo Debut at e-flux (2012)

Frieze Magazine: Hito Steyerl at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany (2009)