Skip to content

Pratt Photography Lectures: Chair Shannon Ebner and Leslie Hewitt in Conversation

November 14, 2018 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Shannon Ebner, born in New Jersey in 1971, lives and works in New York. She works primarily in photography. Whereas previous work looked to the apparatus of the computer as a processing center for language, recent work explores the body as a site for linguistic transmission. Ebner’s work explores the intersection of language and images through the study of poetic systems. Ebner is the Chair of the Photography Department at Pratt.

Ebner’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Bard Hessel Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others. Ebner’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Presentation House, Vancouver; and Künstlerhaus Austria. Ebner’s work was shown at the 2018 edition of Liverpool Biennial, UK, the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2015); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the 6th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art (2010); and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008). Additionally, Ebner has presented solo exhibitions at Eva Presenhuber Gallery, New York, Altman Siegel, San Francisco; kaufmann repetto, Milan; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Wallspace, New York. In 2019, Ebner will present a solo exhibition at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and kaufmann repetto, Milan.
Publications by Ebner include A Public Character (ICA Miami and ROMA, 2016); Auto Body Collision (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2015); STRIKE(Mousse, 2015); and The Sun as Error (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009).

Leslie Hewitt, born in New York in 1977, lives and works in New York. Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Leslie Hewitt addresses fluid notions of time. Her photographed still life compositions comprised of political, social, and personal materials, which result in multiple histories seen embedded in sculptural, architectural, and “abstract forms.” 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 a collective “sense” of history, political consciousness in contemporary art and everyday life.

Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University; and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany; among others. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York; the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands; included in the 2009 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and in 2015 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) in Göteborg, Sweden and the landmark Photo-Poetics exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Berlin, Germany. Hewitt has work in public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.

Leslie Hewitt’s upcoming exhibitions include Galerie Perrotin, Paris, The 57th Carnegie International, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. A forthcoming monograph, published by OSMOS, will be released in September of 2018.

Image credit (L to R): Shannon Ebner, Notebook Pages, 2009, Ten Chromogenic prints, 13 x 10.29 inches each, Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel Gallery SF, kaufmann repetto (Milan/New York) and Sadie Coles HQ (London); Leslie Hewitt, “Riffs on Real Time with Ground (Rose),” 2018, Digital chromogenic print, silver gelatin print, 95.9 × 142.2 × 5.1 cm, 37 3/4 × 56 × 2 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, Photo Credit: Guillaume Ziccarelli