Born 1971, in Burlington, VT, lives and works in East Corinth, VT and Richmond, VA
Received his MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and his BA from Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
Lauren Gitlen Gallery, New York, NY
Processes of image-making, cycles of consumption and degradation, and the mining of memory are at the heart of Corin Hewitt’s photographic, sculptural, and performative practice. In his 2010–11 photographic series, Recomposed Monochromes, Hewitt examines the contemporary processes of photography, leveraging the mutability and fragility of the medium for conceptual and aesthetic gain, and exposing the life cycle of a digital image. Hewitt, an eighth-generation Vermonter, selects a natural item—a rock or handful of soil—and digitally scans the object. He then reduces that image to a single pixel in order to derive the mean color of the object; a pinch of dirt becomes cerulean blue, a rock becomes a bold yellow. He prints that image—which has now become a monochrome color study—and buries it in the soil. Months later he unearths the print to inspect the toll of time and nature on the once pristine image surface. He discovers that nature has inevitably invaded his highly technical process, returning the reductive image of ‘dirt,’ back towards being dirt again. From here, he once again scans his findings and presents the final image, now hardly minimal but heavily modulated and evocative of the soil itself. These images, conceivably the offspring of an Yves Klein monochrome and a performative earth work like Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), focus the viewer on subjects of entropy and degradation, and ultimately question the process and medium of photography.
