SR Lejeune: Hold me up — SR Lejeune

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present the opening of Hold me up, a solo exhibition of new works by SR Lejeune, marking their second solo presentation with the gallery.

SR Lejeune’s manually machined and assembled sculptures take familiar forms: three gates and a grate. Working as designed, gates and grates separate and enclose while allowing light, fluid, and air to pass. These infrastructural elements operate at the level of bodies to both regulate and produce the permeability of public and private space. As sculptures in Hold me up, they appear in their particularity, asking us to think instead about their operation, their humble procedures and minor modalities.

A solitary aluminum grate is reminiscent of those that wound the sidewalk, incising into the subterranean passages below. This one, however, rests above the floor to show its meaty side. Parts of it are polished to a mirror finish, reflecting rather than receding. Small pieces of cast pewter gum sit within it as if it were their own little stage.

Three gates form an overlapping triptych that segments the open field of the gallery. One stands on its own while two others are affixed to the walls. They might be arranged into a new configuration. Each is a version of a retractable scissor gate whose parameters are interpreted anew, distorted. The mechanical connections offer each length its expandability. One of the gates, however, does not perform as usual—its scissor mechanism has a variation. A small change alters the binary logic of its construction and its capacities: as part of the gate expands, another is forced to retract. The gate loses its primary affordance.

Lejeune transforms the mechanized process of tapping and milling through their handwork. Light industrial models are bent and folded to produce deviations. Caring attention distorts, giving us little mutilations that result in the loss of reproducible function. These sculptures neither recede into the ground nor resolve in the gallery as figures. Instead, the result of their fabrication occasions an encounter with the emotional content of a mechanical situation. Restricted and liberated, could they conjure the oscillation of pain and pleasure? These components abandon their duties, arranged here to traffic between economies of tactility, trade, and desire.

SR Lejeune (b. 1994, Boston, MA) received a BA with High Honors from Oberlin College (2015), was a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft (2017-19) and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art (2023). SR was the 2023 West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné and a 2025 Windgate Artist-in-Residence at the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase. They have additionally completed residencies at the Dirt Palace, lower_cavity, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Women’s Studio Workshop and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Their recent solo exhibitions include "Witness Marks" at HESSE FLATOW (NYC, NY), “contributing structure” at Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (Boone, NC), and “tilt” at the Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery (Purchase, NY). They have taught workshops at the Penland School of Craft, Women’s Studio Workshop, SUNY Purchase, Dieu Donné, Bard College, Appalachian State University and the Yucca Valley Materials Lab. SR is currently based in Pine Plains, NY where they are (slowly) building out a manual machine shop.