Conversation: with Michelle Stuart and Connie Butler

Connie Butler, Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and former Chief Curator of Drawing at The Museum of Modern Art will discuss Michelle Stuart’s long and distinguished career, with a special focus on her most recent photographic works, on view at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York, through December 20, 2014.

The compositions inSilent Movies(November 1 – December 20), created over the last two years, present universal themes with deeply personal associations. They contain keys to resonant events and evoke times and places in a manner both specific and archetypical. “The effect can be cinematic,” asThe New Yorker described, “full of jump cuts, or meditative.” Stuart uses the vast archive of analog and digital photographs that she has taken and collected for almost half a century and activates their aesthetic potential by re-contextualizing them in groups, often altering them to weave personal stories. With abundant literary, cinematic, and historical references, these works do not merely address memories, but the very process of recall itself.