In a continuation of the ongoing series Riffs on Real Time, Hewitt presents a new set of chromogenic prints. The series follows a set compositional order: the artist takes discarded artifacts from American mass culture such as newspapers, magazines, books, manila envelopes, amateur snapshots, and other ephemera and repurposes them into visual assemblages. She then composes the objects into stacked arrangements and photographs each composition against the backdrop of hardwood floors or carpets commonly found in households. In this way, Hewitt plays with the idea of a postmodern still life.
Often culled from vintage or used sources, the worn original images create a nostalgic overtone as well as refer to the passage of time. The foreground or first layer—an image of a dining room, a pastor in a church, the front yard of a family home—suggests a personal iconography. The second layer evokes circulated material culture via an item like a schoolbook, magazine, or an advertisement. The third layer is a background of flooring or carpet that reveals various dings, scrapes, or gouges resulting from everyday use. Within this third, seemingly domesticated layer, Hewitt allows the sense of myriad public and private selves to collide and converse. The individual images within each composition tell a story, but their juxtaposition complicates it by calling into question the relationship each image has with the others.