This exhibition is the most significant presentation of New York-based artist Leslie Hewitt’s work to date in an American museum. Her images challenge our understanding of photography as a purely pictorial medium through an approach that emphasizes its sculptural potential. Hewitt repositions and re-contextualizes books, documents, family photographs, and other everyday objects that possess personal, historical, and political significance to demonstrate “the transformative power of circumstance or situation.” Her work also reflects a studied interest in the illusory qualities of film—particularly its ability to expand and compress our perception of time and space—and sculpture’s emphasis on the presence of objects and how they alter our physical experience of the world.  

Leslie Hewitt was born in 1977 and lives and works in New York. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011) and The Kitchen, New York (2010).  Her work has appeared in the group exhibition The Anxiety of Photography, at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2011); Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011); 30 Seconds Off an Inch, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2009); and in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dominic Molon, Chief Curator.