WEAVINGS:
Performance #2 (Portland, OR)
by Corin Hewitt
texts by Michael Brenson and Marisa Sanchez

96 pages, hardcover, 10"x 8"
Edition of 1000
ISBN: 978-0-9799188-4-1

For a three-week performance in Portland, Oregon in 2007, artist Corin Hewitt constructed an elaborate enclosed set. The space combined a kitchen with a photo studio and a live theater. Over the course of the exhibition, Hewitt worked inside the set – cooking, sculpting, heating & cooling, casting, eating, and weaving – as gallery visitors peeked in through a slit in the wall.

The performance merged iconography of the contemporary and historic Northwest, creating hybrid objects and images out of basketry, totems, fabric, canned food, fresh vegetables, grasses and other materials. Along with these items, Hewitt incorporated a selection of objects and images from his own personal history, as well as from the first performance in this ongoing series. The seventy-five color photographs in this book, all made by Hewitt during the performance, document the making and reworking of the various materials.

The third performance in this series occurred at the Whitney Museum of Art from October 3, 2008 - January 4, 2009.

Superimposing the touristic and the personal, the organic and the inorganic, the object and its image, Hewitt creates a body of work that intimately interrogates the cycles of transformation and transience.

CORIN HEWITT combines the sculptural and the theatrical, the photographic and the performative,  and the personal with the public to create work that infuses the present with the material accumulations of the past. Using a variety of processes from casting, photography, and cooking, to model making, the breadth of Hewitt’s work ranges from a monumental cast rainbow made of street sweepings to intimate indoor performances using photography to explore material process. Hewitt holds a BA from Oberlin College and attended both the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe (Germany) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine before receiving his MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.  His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Seattle Museum of Art.