Corin Hewitt

Vermont native Corin Hewitt has described his latest backwoods memory trip of an installation as a “prequel” to his 2008 solo exhibition “Seed Stage” at the Whitney Museum. The latter was a decidedly indoor affair, reconfiguring the museum’s lobby-level gallery with a white-cube structure whose pristine exterior afforded visitors narrow-windowed glimpses into a messy ongoing experiment that was part hydroponic, part culinary, and part multimedia performance. The same preoccupation with the studio as the site for cycles of consumption, representation, and display is at work in the new show, but the waft of pine-scented air that hits you as you enter the gallery is just the first indication that this is a far more sylvan affair.

The artist—whose father, Frank Hewitt, taught art at the University of Vermont—has constructed an off-kilter wooden floor, interrupted by inscrutable bands of muted color and gaps through which pedestals hoisting scanners stuffed with dirt and other natural materials stick up their heads like well-fed groundhogs. But what’s really going on here is underground: Beneath the stage is a subterranean forest laboratory strewn with leaves and mulch, pillared by truncated conifers, and wired with computers, cameras, and lights. The artist is in residence here several days a week, collecting, scanning, and digitally manipulating images of organic materials—the whole process is projected on a video screen in an adjoining gallery space—digitally distilling each dirty, earthy scan until it reaches the point of bright Color Field–esque abstraction. These are printed out and reintroduced to the pine needles, leaves, and compost on the floor: a figure for the complex, reiterative loops of memory and perception, and an elliptical homecoming.