HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Witness Marks, an exhibition of works in handmade paper by New York-based artist SR Lejeune, marking their first solo presentation with the gallery.
Informed by their daily commute to the studio while a West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné, Lejeune’s Witness Marks series charts the often-overlooked traces and patterns adorning city sidewalks. Noticing subtle changes over the course of a year, the artist creates composite images of treaded surfaces, pulling both from photographs that function like field recordings as well as their memory of how a place appeared on a particular day. Like the layered nature of making paper by hand, these works embody a cumulative process of mark-making through both aggregation and erosion.
The artist continued the Witness Marks series during a residency at Women’s Studio Workshop. Located in Rosendale, NY, this region’s history of limestone mining and cement production plays into Lejeune’s musings over the material and allegorical conversation between paper and concrete. Despite the former’s associations with ephemerality, its resilience (as archive, as recording device) underscores a tension that carries throughout Lejeune’s works. Conversely, concrete’s seemingly fixed and impenetrable exterior proves to be porous and susceptible to deterioration. Its translation into paper ensures its longevity.
The concept of “witnessing” introduces the breakdown of binary systems of strength and fragility, legibility and invisibility, and the industrial and the handmade within Lejeune’s works. The artist originally understood the term “witness mark” in reference to manually machining metal. Textures not erased by the next operation, “witness marks” are persistent visual information that expose how something was made. Whether a flat swirl from an endmill or a watermark from the chain stitch of a laid paper mold, these marks hold the memory of tools and the people that wield them. The term “witness mark” also references the stamped hatch marks and sprayed fluorescent symbols that signal the location of essential buried infrastructure like telecommunication and water lines. Through their pulp compositions, Lejeune combines this symbology with representations of mundane human imprints (stains from dog pee, splotches of chewed gum) to signal the density of information present on the surfaces of daily routine. These works speak to the cyclical nature of construction and serve as reminders of our participation in the making of our surroundings.
