Artist spotlight

Artist spotlight | November 3 to 6, 2026 | A young or lesser known artist doing something fresh, picked by us.

SR Lejeune

A gate is supposed to know its job: open, close, keep somebody out. SR Lejeune gives that familiar mechanism a different script. In Hold me up at HESSE FLATOW in Tribeca, three gates and a grate turn ordinary infrastructure into a question about bodies, access and control.

Hold me up installation view, posted by HESSE FLATOW. Photo: Jenny Gorman, courtesy of the artist and HESSE FLATOW. Shown through Instagram's official embed, not copied here. See the post on Instagram.

When the hinge argues

Lejeune machines and assembles the metal by hand. The gates overlap across the gallery, one freestanding and two attached to walls. A scissor gate usually expands or retracts as a unit. Here, one mechanism has been changed so that one part opens while another closes. The object still looks familiar, but its logic slips.

The grate gets its own small rebellion. Lifted from its usual position underfoot, with sections polished like a mirror and little pieces of cast pewter gum lodged inside, it asks for the attention a sidewalk rarely gets. These are not props for an imaginary building. They make the rules of an actual room feel less settled.

Our summary of the exhibition and Zoey Kira Lubitz's accompanying text: HESSE FLATOW.

The artist behind it

Born in Boston in 1994 and based in Pine Plains, New York, Lejeune works across sculpture and papermaking. They studied at Oberlin and earned an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 2023. A 2026 residency at Bemis Center sits alongside teaching and a manual machine shop taking shape in upstate New York. The thread is a hand-built practice that keeps testing what a form can do, instead of locking it into one final answer.

Biography: Bemis Center | Work and project photographs: the artist's website.

On view | New York

Hold me up

October 30 to December 5, 2026 | HESSE FLATOW, 77 Franklin Street | Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm

Dates and visitor details verified November 3: hesseflatow.com.

See the room

Gallery posts below show the exhibition and its opening announcement. The images stay with their publisher through Instagram's official player. If the embed is unavailable, each caption links to the original post.

HESSE FLATOW's installation carousel. Slides 1 and 2 show Hold me up; later slides show sonia louise davis. Photos: Jenny Gorman, courtesy of the artists and HESSE FLATOW. See the post on Instagram.

HESSE FLATOW's exhibition announcement and a view of Lejeune's manually machined sculpture. See the post on Instagram.

Further conversation: The Brooklyn Rail's November 3 program with SR Lejeune and Joshua Chee Sanford. Check the publisher's page for any recording; we have not verified one.