Leslie Hewitt’s Photographs Revel in Buried Symbolism
The artist’s sparse, poetic show at Perrotin, Los Angeles, approaches post-minimalism as a vehicle for historical remembrance
The artist’s sparse, poetic show at Perrotin, Los Angeles, approaches post-minimalism as a vehicle for historical remembrance

In ‘New Waves’ at Perrotin, four large-scale, elegantly minimalist photographs by Leslie Hewitt rest on the floor leaned against the wall – an irregular display tactic that the artist frequently employs. Embracing the dimensional space of the room, these works breach the invisible boundary between image and viewer; their physical weight and heft position them as discrete sculptural entities. Referencing the concept of mise-en-abyme, or the image within the image, the photographs depict tidy arrangements of objects staged on a floor and leaning against a wall. In each, the thin edge of a plywood square is perched atop one or two piles of books, gently compressing the volumes with its weight. Mimicking the installation of the photographs in the gallery, the flat plane of this tilted board faces the viewer as it rests against the wall behind it, articulating a sense of synchronicity between real and imagistic space and destabilizing the distinction between image and object.
The sculptural totems in Hewitt’s photographs can be read as both still lifes and minimalist abstractions. In Untitled (The Notion of Labor) (2019), the image is predominantly geometric: the plywood square obliquely rests on two rectangular piles of books, spines obscured, rendering their contents anonymous and their shapes strictly formal. Largely devoid of contextual information, this sparse, poetic image could be a photographic ode to Josef Albers, with its perspectival lines coalescing to form simple abstract geometries. As a vignette of objects in space, it likewise alludes to vanitas paintings of the Dutch baroque, wherein each component carries symbolic meaning. The only spines that Hewitt divulges appear in Untitled (The Sun Rose and the World Became Radiant) (2019). The titles revealed – Ark of Bones (1974), Henry Dumas’s short story collection, and Black Orpheus (1948) by Jean-Paul Sartre, a reflection on the anti-colonial Négritude movement – highlight Black narratives and voices: a gesture of illumination reinforced by the work’s title. With photographic abstractions that often serve as metaphoric monuments to Black literary traditions (this work stems from the artist’s 2019 exhibition that reimagined Harlem’s National Memorial African Bookstore), Hewitt posits post-minimalism as a vehicle for historical remembrance.
While these photographs physically lean into the space of the gallery, a three-dimensional still life across the room sculpturally recedes from it. Here, a rectangular alcove carved from the wall forms a sunken frame blanketed with porcelain-hued Moroccan tiles. Perfectly centred within this is a bulbous conch shell framed by a triangular tambourine and haloed by a cymbal: all bronze-cast objects the colour of bone. A taut, copper wire extends horizontally across the top of this concave space, suggesting the conduction of sound or energy. Aptly, part of the 2024 work’s 111-word title proposes the sculpture as a musical score: This Score May Be Realized in Any Imaginative Way, or in Conjunction with or in Response to the Recording of the Song Rock Steady 00:03:15 on the album Young Gifted and Black, Atlantic Records (1972). As Hewitt, with collaborator Jamal Cyrus, centres another Black cultural touchstone, she invokes a sense of synaesthesia, folding the rhythm and cadence of sound into the haptic qualities of sculpture with a speculative musical composition.
At the centre of the gallery, Untitled (Imperceptible, Slow Drag, Barely Moving) (2022) – a loose installation of chartreuse glass bowls, curved wooden wedges and steel beams – functions as a visual parenthesis: a sculptural punctuation mark that frames the entire exhibition as a multifaceted negotiation of language. Here, as Hewitt posits looking as a form of reading, interpreting her work is akin to engaging in literary analysis: her visual text evades didacticism and revels in the poetics of buried symbolism.
Leslie Hewitt, ‘New Waves’ is on view at Perrotin, Los Angeles, until 25 January
Main image: Leslie Hewitt, ‘New Waves’, 2024–5, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Perrotin; photograph: Paul Salveson