Stephen Wirtz Gallery Displays New Photographs by Todd Hido

Written by Andrew Greenslade Tuesday, 17 January 2012 00:21

San Francisco, California.- Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present "Excerpts from Silver Meadows", an exhibition of new photographs by Todd Hido, on view at the gallery until February 25th 2012. Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative, atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated places in America provide the setting, and portraits of female subjects, broken starlets in suburban dress, stand in as the main characters. While the subject matter is mined from Hido’s own experience growing up in Kent, Ohio, what results is a collectively familiar, yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama untethered from a specific time and place, a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology. Silver Meadows itself is a real place—a modest Midwestern suburban development that grew and pushed into former farmland on the outskirts of Kent.  The setting of Hido’s childhood, it also became the creative wellspring for his work. Compelled to contend with his personal history, Hido wanders deliberately yet randomly in search of imagery that connects with his recollections.

In Excerpts from Silver Meadows, this memory-driven approach turns his personal history into an ethereal realm populated by the exquisite and the insidious.  Collectively, these photographs present the artist’s metaphorical reckoning with his own past, while providing a majestic summation of the suburban childhood experience in general, where community can be constructed from whole cloth, and homes built similarly to convey stability actually conceal lives seething with sexual and psychological instability. From homes like these, generations of American teenagers have sought escape through the emancipating pleasures promised by sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Hido’s landscape work is made during lengthy road trips in which he sets up his camera and takes photographs often through the windshield of his car, essentially using the windshield as an additional lens.  He often photographs during inclement weather, using a streaking, blurring visual effect produced by rain and snow as a veil to advance the mysterious and unsettling tone of the images. On Hido’s recent publication A Road Divided, Photoeye.com states “Hido has long since secured his place among the most notable photographers of his generation, A Road Divided proves that reputation makes no unkept promises.” Doug Rickard, on American Suburb X writes:  “In the context of this horribly mundane world of current contemporary photography, Todd's work stands apart from the pack by a wide gap. This gap is made up by the sledgehammer authenticity of Todd's vision, by a violent undercurrent of emotion that hits the viewer like a baseball bat clearing a drunken human path.  This is photography...as it should be. Giving a middle finger to genre, telling concept or categorization to kindly f-off, Todd has upped his ante with the new work and continues to be left to stand in his own space, defying classification... carving out his own path.”

Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist who received his M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1996 and his B.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Tufts University. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and are included in numerous museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections.  His work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Metropolis, The Face, I-D, and Vanity Fair.  In 2001 an award-winning monograph of his work titled House Hunting was published by Nazraeli Press and a companion monograph, Outskirts, was published in 2002. His third book, Roaming, was published in 2004.  Between the Two, focusing on portraits and nudes, was published in 2007.  His latest book of landscapes, A Road Divided, was published in 2010.  In Late 2012 a full volume of Silver Meadows will be launched at Paris Photo 2012. He is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California

Open since 1972, the Stephen Wirtz gallery is one of the biggest and most established art spaces at 49 Geary. Owners Stephen and Connie Wirtz have always emphasized photography, but they also exhibit painting and sculpture. The gallery represents national and international artists with a focus on Northern California artists and non-objective and conceptually based art. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.wirtzgallery.com

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