Leslie Hewitt’s exhibition at Perrotin New York, titled Soft tremulous light, is accompanied by the text Angles of a landscape by Elleza Kelley, as a joint exploration of and reaction to what French anthropologist Marc Augé addressed as supermodernity. Throughout Hewitt's two decades-long practice, she has developed installations that position the personal, the collective and the literary as interchangeable elements in a seemingly endless series of compositions. The exhibition includes representative works from the following: Riffs on real time, Birthmark, Rough cuts and a new collaborative work titled Rhombus or humming song (1 - 4 - 5) with fellow artist and life-partner Jamal Cyrus; minimally installed as a constellation.

In Riffs on real time, Hewitt devotes a year to envisioning sets of temporary triadic sculptures composed from stacked layers of found photographs, archival books, magazines, and obscured documents. Anchored by grounds such as her studio floors and photographed from above, these assemblages compress spatial and temporal strata into a single visual field. In doing so, they enact what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin terms a chronotope—a configuration in which space and time are inseparable—allowing new spatial logics and temporal resonances to emerge.

Birthmark, a counter-monument first installed on the grounds of Dia Bridgehampton, takes the form of a boulder shaped over centuries by natural forces, its surface quasi-inlaid with a bronze composite contour echoing barrier islands and bodies of water. In re-siting this work within the “white cube,” Hewitt acknowledges both the constraints and affordances of institutional space. The extended iteration, Rough cuts, incorporates pointed references to the obfuscation and disruption of nineteenth-century taxonomies, presenting abstracted interpretations of botanical illustrations of various American wildflowers. These gestures not only resist classificatory fixity but also re-inscribe ephemeral and overlooked forms of knowledge into the art-historical record.

The collaborative wall sculpture Rhombus or humming song (1–4–5), constructed from wood and bronze, continues Hewitt's and Cyrus' investigation into the interrelations between sound, form, and resonance, suggesting a synesthetic mapping of sensorial experience. Moving fluidly between sculpture and photography—and back again—Soft tremulous light engages geological and photographic time, framing depth as a visual, psychological and tactile encounter. Here, the chronotope (2) functions not merely as a conceptual device but as an phenomenological condition, situating the viewer within an experiential field where the scales of memory, perception, and historical consciousness converge.