Soft Tremulous Light, Leslie Hewitt’s exhibition at Perrotin New York, unfolds as a poetic meditation on time, memory, and the layered nature of perception. Accompanied by the text Angles of a Landscape by Elleza Kelley, the presentation forms a dialogue around the concept of supermodernity, a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé to describe the acceleration and excess of contemporary experience. Hewitt approaches this theme through her distinctive visual language, merging photography, sculpture, and installation into compositions that feel both deliberate and open-ended.
Spanning over two decades of artistic inquiry, the exhibition gathers works from seminal series including Riffs on Real Time, Birthmark, and Rough Cuts, alongside a new collaborative project with artist and life partner Jamal Cyrus titled Rhombus or Humming Song (1 - 4 - 5). Presented as a minimal constellation, these works invite viewers to navigate the shifting boundaries between the personal and the collective, the literary and the material. Hewitt’s installations often juxtapose archival imagery with sculptural elements, evoking a sense of suspended narrative where histories—both intimate and shared—are continually reassembled.
Throughout her career, Hewitt has developed an approach that resists linear readings of time. Her works instead unfold in rhythms and echoes, reflecting how memory and cultural identity persist through fragmentation. The restraint of her formal compositions—carefully balanced objects, photographs, and negative space—suggests that meaning resides as much in what is omitted as in what is shown.
Soft Tremulous Light coincides with Hewitt’s exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art, curated by Lauren Richman, further affirming her position as one of the most thoughtful voices in contemporary art. Through her precise and contemplative practice, Hewitt continues to redefine how we experience the intersections of image, history, and the passage of time.
Image: Leslie Hewitt. Birthmark, 2022. Bronze, boulder. 18 x 32 x 23 inches. Photographer: Don Stahl. Courtesy of the artist and Dia Art Foundation.
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