From You to Me and Back Again is a project proposed to Wallspace by Leslie Hewitt and Matt Keegan that explores the “nature” of the photographic medium.

Incorporating the floors, walls, and the corners where they meet, Hewitt and Keegan use the gallery space as a site to continue a five-yearlong conversation about photography, its abstractions, politics and subjectivities.

Hewitt uses the camera as a tool to reposition ones view, subtly disrupting the window effect and expectations of a photographic document. She engages architectural space and the fragmentation of time through photographic and sculptural means. One of her works for the project is Make It Plain (4 of 5), 2006, an uncanny photograph of a seemingly simple arrangement of disparate objects addressing appropriation and loss, printed to billboard scale. Hewitt’s larger-than-life-size image exposes the syncretism of a seemingly mundane section of a room.

Keegan uses photographs to collage locations and moments, exposing the slippage of memory and the role that photographs play as stand-ins for the experiential. His photographs and collages originate from a 4×6-standardized scale and evolve to their final size and composition through a rigorous process of layering and sculpting, resulting in a complex aesthetic informed by the processes of remembering and forgetting. For Sky Pocket, 2006, Keegan works with a mirrored image and its frame to carve out a space within the gallery where the distinctions between sculptural and photographic are folded in on themselves.

Hewitt and Keegan mine their shared relationship to the medium in individual and collaborative site-specific projects. Their collaborative work CMYK floral, 2006, is a time-based piece that shifts for the duration of the exhibition, pointing to the artificiality of the color system we experience daily. In Reflection, 2006, Hewitt and Keegan create a mirrored replica of an architectural feature of the gallery, transforming the act of reproduction into a physical experience. Both artists are interested in modes of display that shift conventions and have looked to the architectural quirks of the space to guide their installation decisions. The result is a series of subtle interventions that turns the artists’ attraction to the peripheral into a stance.

During the months leading up to the presentation of this project, Hewitt and Keegan extended invitations to artist Michael Queenland and writer Laurie Salmon to collaborate with them in written conversations. The result of this synergy is a small publication. This publication is the realization of From You to Me and Back Again, extending the limits of the exhibition through dialogue and distribution.

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