RED HOT INGOT
IAN LEWANDOWSKI
7/11/25-8/16/25
Ashley Jude Jonas - finding myth or the feeling / the front,
Cyanotype, photographic imagery from the archive, found ephemera, 2025
The Weather Station is pleased to present Red Hot Ingot, an exhibition of new and past work by Ian Lewandowski. Red Hot Ingot brings together a body of photographs from this NYC-based artist (originally from Roselawn, Indiana), whose recent projects look towards the Midwest as a crucible of identities. In Lewandowski's photography, unseen communities and the psychic forces that drive them are revealed - and in Red Hot Ingot, he shifts his focus to the state of Indiana through his ongoing documentation of queer Hoosiers alongside an investigation into past photographs native to his home state.
A photograph on the front of an old, faded postcard features a glowing, red mass emerging from an industrial oven. On the back, this caption: Red hot ingots are rolled into various sizes and shapes on rolling mills of U.S. Steel Corporation's Gary Steel Works. Lewandowski initially came to this phrase, from which this exhibition takes its title, while researching the imagery of Northwest Indiana, home to multiple generations of the artist's family and a place from which he fled more than a decade ago. This arresting image of the molten steel process remained with the artist, over time coming to represent many of the contradictions embodied by the Hoosier state itself. "An ingot is a more manageable form of something really dangerous," he reasons, "but you can still see its danger after the fact." Molded by extreme heat and physical labor, an ingot is an object determined by practicality, whose geometric, stackable form bears little resemblance to its unruly, material nature. With Red Hot Ingot, Lewandowski overlays these associations onto the Midwest - the place by which both he and his subjects have been forged.
Vintage postcard from Gary Steel Works, circa 1960
Just inside the entrance to Red Hot Ingot are two of the older and larger works on view, Crowd of Women I and TRIAD, both produced in 2017 while Lewandowski completed his M.F.A. at S.U.N.Y. Purchase. In each, Lewandowski begins with an appropriated image from his parents' Indiana high school yearbooks, which he then scanned, inverted, and enlarged as gelatin silver prints. When tiled together to create the large works in this exhibition, these dated, predictable pictures of groups of high school students take on new resonance. With the forced group identity of such an image, any individual trait is eclipsed, absorbed. Initially conceived as a response to photographs of the 2017 Women's March in Washington, D.C., Crowd of Women I makes full use of the visual impact of human faces in assembly, emphasizing the kind of compulsory happiness characteristic of a high school pep rally. The more restrained TRIAD features three young men, poised and largely expressionless, who make up the school Photography Club. Fittingly, the name of the yearbook from which Lewandowski sourced these images is Reflector; and what is reflected are the readymade roles that these young Hoosiers seem to have had available to them at the time. Situated directly across from each other in the gallery, these images form an uneasy dialogue.
Left: Crowd of Women I, Gelatin silver prints, 25.75 in x 23.75 in, 2017
Right: TRIAD, Gelatin silver prints, 29.675 in x 33.25 in, 2017
Right: TRIAD, Gelatin silver prints, 29.675 in x 33.25 in, 2017
By enlarging and recontextualizing these images from the past, Lewandowski suggests a continuity between them and his own pictures of the present. Connections across picture histories are significant for the artist, who works primarily with a large-format camera to create his own photographs. The large-format camera is a specific and unusual choice for a contemporary photographer: it's an unwieldy machine requiring no small degree of patience, and a strong sensitivity to photographic process and the conditions in which the image is taken. Given the speed, convenience, and ubiquitous nature of digital techniques, Lewandowski's commitment to analogue processes work against the trajectory of the medium. His large-format portraits prioritize slowing down, remaining present, and above all truly seeing the subjects. It's these qualities that are felt most vividly in Lewandowski's portraits, which lend a historic quality to these decidedly contemporary people. People like this, they seem to say, have never not existed.
Left: Adair + Ivy, Club Cuntry, The Black Circle, Indianapolis, 8 in x 10 in gelatin silver contact print ed. 1 of 2 (+ 1 AP), 2024
Right: Slim, Club Cuntry, The Black Circle, Indianapolis, 8 in x 10 in gelatin silver contact print ed. 1 of 2 (+ 1 AP), 2024
Right: Slim, Club Cuntry, The Black Circle, Indianapolis, 8 in x 10 in gelatin silver contact print ed. 1 of 2 (+ 1 AP), 2024
In June of 2023, following an absence of nearly a decade, Lewandowski returned to the Midwest for an artist's residency at Aurora PhotoCenter in Indianapolis. During this period the artist began photographing queer Hoosiers at various Pride events across the city. Using his large-format camera, these frank portraits - primarily taken outdoors - bear witness to the city-wide revelry unfolding over Pride month, but they do so through the myriad characters that emerge to celebrate. Lewandowski gives little or no instructions in these portraits, preferring instead to capture each subject as they present themselves to his camera. As such, a range of singular personalities, mannerisms, and gestures emerge from the larger network of Pride festivities. But taken as a whole, these portraits document a Midwestern queer visibility with urgency, one largely (and predictably) absent from Lewandowski's own upbringing in northwest Indiana. Working in contrast to the appropriated images drawn from Reflector, Lewandowski's Pride portraits describe a complex picture of an entire region - one that has changed significantly during the decade the artist has been gone, and one that continues to evolve. This evolution is of interest to the artist as well, who intends to use this exhibition as an opportunity to continue this project. As a closing event of Red Hot Ingot, Lewandowski will be making new portraits of willing attendees to Lafayette OUTfest in downtown Lafayette.
Above: Arlo blowing up an air mattress, Roselawn, 10 in x 8 in gelatin silver contact print ed. 1 of 2 (+ 1 AP), 2024
For Red Hot Ingot, the Weather Station has also collaborated with Two Steps Press to publish outline(s), a limited-edition artist book to accompany the exhibition. With outline(s), Indianapolis-based writer Taylor Lewandowski debuts an original work of short fiction in response to the photographs on view. Lewandowski’s subtle and moving prose imagines an inter-generational conversation between Indiana residents, each of whom find themselves negotiating the forces that Red Hot Ingot seeks to articulate. In the absence of anything else to give, the characters in Lewandowski's fiction give themselves to one another.
Copies of outline(s) will be available for purchase during the run of the exhibition.
Ian Lewandowski (b. 1990) is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. The Ice Palace Is Gone, his body of large-format color portraits made from 2018-19, was published as his first monograph by Magic Hour Press (Montréal) in 2021. My Man Mitch, his body of photographs and photo-based material native to his home state of Indiana, was published by Kult Books (Stockholm) in 2022. He teaches undergraduate and continuing education courses in photography at The New School, The International Center of Photography (ICP), and Gowanus Darkroom, and manages and prints the photo work of Kenny Gardner (1913-2002). He lives in Brooklyn with his husband Anthony and their dog Seneca.