Spotlight Review - Massachusetts

Duncan Hewitt: the smallest eight I can skate
Coleman Burke Gallery • Brunswick, ME • Through June 13, 2009

Duncan Hewitt: Diminished Objects
Icon Contemporary Art • Brunswick, ME

Duncan Hewitt makes sculpture that is easy to understand, almost. Porch mattress is a dark-rose-colored object that looks enough like a mattress, with ticking buttons and edge piping, that one might easily be tricked into stretching out on its nearly six-foot-long expanse, only to find that it is in fact a carved-wood object. More than its appearance or its likeness, Porch mattress is an evocation of a species of objects that narrates human story.

In his double show at Coleman Burke Gallery and Icon Contemporary Art, Hewitt presents a collection of prosaic objects readdressed as carved-wood things that signal familiarity. Hewitt uses the large industrial space at Coleman Burke for a project called the smallest eight I can skate, which contains large, wheeled, boxed platforms, each displaying carved ice skates of various types. The platforms are fitted with push bars, inviting viewers to move them about the floor as a reenactment of gliding on skates.

The skates are each fixed on carved-wood plinths—little blocks of ice. Perched as though in motion, the skates hint at unseen skaters. Hewitt quietly enlists the viewer in an ambitious enterprise that shifts scale from the small and particular to the large and contextual. One finds oneself attending to the individual carvings as portrayals of parts of persons, and time-bearers of the wear of use. Shoe tongues fold in or out from the lumpy forms as if controlled by spirits.

One room at Icon contains a series of carved fireplace screens as well as a few old metal screens that served as models. Some are set on the floor, others on a large platform, painted to look like a brick wall laid flat. The platform is in fact a reworking of an element from an earlier sculpture. Included is a small collection of carved-wood “brass” screen handles, suggesting a showroom of sorts. Like the skates, the fireplace screens have been altered as though by use. They have the sag and the obstinacy of being old. The largest of these screens, placed near a wall as if hiding an implied fireplace, its architectural partner, behind its dark cloak. In its role as screen, the form plays against any elegant sculptural posing.

Hewitt’s courage as an artist is in his willingness to play against an easy aesthetic. The installations of the sculptures at Icon are deliberations on how we attend to ideas. Another room has a platform raised to slightly above table height that nearly takes up the whole space, allowing slim entry along one side, limiting access to the one object it holds. This is a carved window curtain, again from an earlier sculpture where it had “curtained” the lower half of a carved window. In this iteration, the curtain stands alone, aligned, with a real window beyond it, closer to the viewer at the entry to the room than to the center of the platform. As a form, it shares the lumpy woodenness of the fireplace screens along with their dark gray color. It billows, or more accurately it sits in a state of billowing. The breeze that shaped it is memorialized, fixed like a verb turned into a noun.

Hewitt’s art is a poetic configuration of known things taken from what must be his internal warehouse. It seems more than fitting that he in some cases reconsiders these objects, presenting them in new guises. In other cases, he replays objects. A long, slim, red air mattress is a quiet object laid flat on another raised platform joined in the space by two new, unpainted, carved air mattresses. The new mattresses have yet to receive marks of use. These objects are time-neutral; they betray no age, no story but the short story of being freshly made. Thus Hewitt cuts off nostalgia at the knees, opting instead for a plain-spoken account of things without the saturation of romance.

—David Raymond

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