Michael Brenson

Corin Hewitt: Weavings: Performance No. 2 (Portland, OR) Michael Brenson

During a three-week residency at Portland, Oregon's Small A Projects in 2007, New York-based artist Corin Hewitt, born in 1971, constructed an elaborate workspace within the gallery, complete with a kitchen, photo studio and theater in which the apron-wearing artist performed a series of tasks--cooking, sculpting, eating and weaving--as gallery visitors viewed him through a peephole. Merging elements representing both the contemporary and the historic Northwest, Hewitt transformed such materials as baskets, fabric, canned food, fresh vegetables and grass--as well as elements from the first performance in this ongoing series--into hybridized objects. The 75 color photographs in this book, all taken on-site by Hewitt, document the performance. Combining the sculptural with the theatrical, the photographic with the performative, Hewitt's innovative work has also been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Seattle Art Museum and Taxter & Spengemann gallery in New York.