Hauser & Wirth New York presents ‘In the Wake’, its first exhibition with New York based Zoe Leonard. The artist’s distinctive merging of photography, sculpture, and installation will unfold over three floors of the gallery’s townhouse, debuting three new bodies of work that balance the rigorous conceptualism and personal vision for which she has achieved critical recognition. On view through 22 October, the photographs and sculptures in the exhibition probe the generational impact of displacement and what Leonard has described as 'statelessness as both an individual experience and a shared social condition.'

With the work on view at Hauser & Wirth, Leonard draws a connection between the social upheaval of the postwar years and the rise of photography as a popular medium. The family snapshot can be understood as a form of self representation and a mode of describing and sharing lived experience, an alternative to official representations of history. Leonard photographs these snapshots not only as images, but as objects – paper curled, surfaces shiny, and edges scalloped, cracked, or cut – in a way that pushes imagery to the edge of legibility and calls into question the idea of faithful reproduction or representation.