Sculptor Corin Hewitt (Photo courtesy the artist)
Ever been curious about the ground beneath your feet? Or wondered about the people who used to live in your home or walk across your land? Richmond artist and Virginia Commonwealth University sculpture professor Corin Hewitt begins with these questions. Last year, Hewitt dug into the ground beneath his two-story home and studio on Granby Street in the Fan District looking for artifacts. A new art exhibition, “Shadows Are to Shade,” at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU focuses on his finds.
“I became more and more interested in the history of this place, and I decided to dig these trenches in the middle of my studio,” Hewitt says.
He also culled through archives at the Valentine museum, the Library of Virginia and the Richmond Public Library, as well as researched ancestry.com and digital census records. He discovered that prior to his house's 1915 construction, the land was owned by the Ford family. The father purchased farmland stretching from Main Street to Cary Street to Allen Avenue for his son, a deserter who returned in 1864 and worked as an ice dealer, excavator and teamster after the Civil War before amassing a small fortune. The family sold the land in the early 1900s to a developer.
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Art and artifacts from "Shadows Are to Shade" (Photo courtesy Corin Hewitt)
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Photo courtesy Corin Hewitt
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Photo courtesy Corin Hewitt
This history is the foundation for the exhibition, which combines video, scrim walls, land alterations and artifacts — real and fabricated — divided between the second floor of the ICA and a room in Hewitt’s home, which will be open to visitors once a week. While the installation begins with specific places and people — Hewitt’s residence, the Ford family and Richmond — Hewitt uses artificiality, mirrors and doubling to overturn visitors’ assumptions and question how facts are remembered and what stories get told. Moreover, Hewitt, who spent many years living in New York City trying to make it as an artist while supporting himself working as a plumber and electrician, asks visitors to consider the role of labor and its artifacts, such as gas and water lines both active and inactive, that are buried beneath us.
“I’ve always been interested in the relationship of bases to sculpture — what the ground is that the figure stands on,” Hewitt says. “We expect that when we’re standing somewhere there’s a stability to what we’re standing on. I really like to think about unpacking that, the historical stability and the firmament that’s under that, [even] thinking about that politically.”
“Shadows Are to Shade” is on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU through Sept. 1.
