With her three large boulder-like bronzes lying on the floor of Dia Bridgehampton, Leslie Hewitt's sculptures don't offer a viewer much to work with at first. But the smooth and reflective flat surface on each draws one to them like a Siren song.
Comparing them, it becomes apparent that the dimensions and shape of each sculpture vary in significant ways. There is a sense that something more complex is afoot, but the actual underpinnings are lost on any but the most dedicated local cartographer.
The exhibition essay offers guidance. What is on view are distillations of three local bays -- Mecox, Peconic, and Shinnecock -- with their surfaces and depths captured by 3-D printing to a relatively tiny scale. The resulting print was then cast in bronze, with the reflective surfaces delineating the bays' outlines and the matte sides approximating their deepest points.
Outside, an actual boulder sits on the grounds with a small matte bronze inlay. Titled "Birthmark," its shape is an amalgamation of the three bays referenced inside. The geological time referenced by the rock is intended to break the continuity of recent centuries of human history and their associated colonialism. Instead, the sculpture extols the trajectory of radical movements, its bronze inlay absorbing light and gaining power in that way.
In its yearlong installations, Dia asks artists to react to the space in some way. Many choose Dan Flavin's fluorescent light sculptures upstairs. Others bring different sensibilities and interactions to the mix. Ms. Hewitt connected to the history of the building itself and its setting in the broader region.
The Corwith Avenue site was a firehouse and then a church before Flavin's renovation of it in 1983 to become an art space. (Known originally as the Dan Flavin Art Institute, Dia changed the name to Dia Bridgehampton a few years ago, but kept the former name as a subtitle.) Flavin kept the room used as the church's choir as a kind of reliquary of objects tied to the building's past.
In conceptualizing these sculptures, Ms. Hewitt drew on Tiffany Lethabo King's book "The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies" for another key theme. In the book, Ms. King describes America's shoals as metaphors for the intersection of Black and Indigenous art, literature, politics, and more. She associates land with the native population and the sea with the arrival of Blacks through the slave trade. Shoals, which are offshore and neither land or sea, create a meeting ground. The nearby Shinnecock (loosely translated into English as "people from the stony shore") Indian Reservation in Southampton and the Eastville area of Sag Harbor can be seen as actual meeting grounds in this vein, tied to local history.
Yet Ms. Hewitt appears more interested in the metaphor of the shoals and their implied role as natural protection from invasion. The "rock formations, coral beds, and sandbars" are a material barrier to settlers as well as a figurative protection against their worldview. In this context, the installation, united both inside and outside, can be seen as relating to a shoal.
Quoted in Matilde Guidelli-Guidi's exhibition essay, Ms. King says "the shoal requires new footing, different chords of embodied rhythms, and new conceptual tools to navigate its terrain." An associate professor at the University of Virginia, she will present research from "The Black Shoals" at Dia Chelsea on Jan. 22 at noon.
These rhythms are further explored on a video monitor mounted on the downstairs gallery's west-facing wall, a piece with one of the longest titles in art history: "For Solo Piano, Alto Saxophone, or Tambourine . . ." (included here without the list of interpretive suggestions in the title's parentheses).
The monitor displays a shell and a triangular driftwood tambourine with metadata scrolling in a box on the left. Also in the scroll are directions Thelonius Monk gave to Steve Lacy for playing saxophone in his composition "Evidence," further referred to in the unabridged title. Ms. Hewitt worked with the artist Jamal Cyrus to conceive the idea for the score. Their own soundscape can be faintly heard in the installation or more intimately through a single headphone.
Touching on traditions of Fluxus and jazz, the artists "explore the intersections of experimental music, notions of political resistance theorized in the Black Radical Tradition, and the elemental sounds, patterns, and breaks of the ocean as it meets the shore," according to Ms. Guidelli-Guidi. Here, the still life is divorced from its historical form and meaning and is subsumed into an oral tradition referencing sound and instruments.
The artists invited three other artists to interpret their score in a way that emphasizes experimentation, discovery, sensing, and listening. Two events remain: Immanuel Wilkins on March 5 at Dia Chelsea and Rashida Bumbray on May 14 at a location and time to be announced. The exhibition will continue in Bridgehampton until June 4.
