The Hudson River Museum To Exhibit "Susan Wides: Hudson Valley, From Mannahatta to Kaaterskill"

Written by Jacques Peinard Friday, 22 April 2011 21:39

New York.- The Hudson River Museum is proud to present "Susan Wides: Hudson Valley, From Mannahatta to Kaaterskill" from May 28 until September 11. The exhibition is a survey of Susan Wides’ investigation of New York City and its surrounding landscape in 50 large-scale photographs. This exhibition represents Wides’ fourteen-year study of the perception of place using sites from the urban-rural spectrum along the Hudson River. With her camera, Wides creates a transformative vision expressing her intuitive and conceptual response to the landscape, cityscape, and social environment. The Hudson River Museum provides a fitting context for Wides’ work. Around the geological forms that inspired the first visitors to the Hudson Valley, a palimpsest of historical, socio-economic, and philosophical stories has developed.

Upon moving to Catskill, NY, Wides began to pull apart these layers. She questioned the fantasy of pure nature that has continually clouded perceptions of the Hudson River landscape. Where the growth of heavy industry during the 19th century had deforested entire regions, artists of the Hudson River School would paint tree-covered hillsides. Wides confirms that these illusions, which helped to form the mandate of Manifest Destiny, are still propagated. As city dwellers escape to the woods upstate, industries ship materials downriver, and land is cleared to sustain the market for quaint rural homes, forming a complex loop. Alongside an idealization of the landscape, new developments overlay aging infrastructure, resulting in an accumulation of contradictions. But Wides’ photographs also retain the Hudson River School’s genuine appreciation for the landscape. Wides’ practice of direct experience allows her to study human participation in the landscape, whether it is the deep green of Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow, or the curves of an ancient glacial boulder among Yonkers’ smokestacks and tombstones. Experiencing a place is often a meditative immersion in the act of beholding. By precisely controlling the plane of focus, she is able to depict how light and time are bent through the filter of our memory. In 1997, after working extensively with selective focus in her previous "Waxworks" and "Botanicals" projects, Wides innovated the technique of changing the swings and tilts of a 4x5 view camera to radically skew the focal plane.



Continuing her confrontation with cultural myths, she bypasses prescribed images of her subjects. Looking deeply reveals inconsistencies and ambiguities in a place. Its history never appears crisply delineated; it is a muddle of erasure and rewriting seen from the present moment. The way Wides’ lens captures roads cutting through a post-industrial town, waterfalls cascading off an iconic cliff, or a flock of birds spattering a landfill creates points of entry into the photographs. Viewers find themselves confronted with the bend of light around an edge, turning the horizon’s corner. The large size of the photographs invites the viewer’s inspection, isolating moments from the tangled weave. They reveal the process of seeing: the eye cannot capture every moment, so memory must fill in the rest. We live in the global city, bombarded by a sea of images. In order to truly connect with a place, we must still walk outside, breathe its air, soak up its light, its spaces and its history. The photographs in ‘Hudson Valley, Mannahatta to Kaaterskill’ embody both a conscious and an unconscious act. Wides invites the viewer to join in this encounter in which perception suddenly changes and the recognizable is reimagined. Visit the artist's website at ... http://www.susanwides.com

The Yonkers Museum, founded in 1919 at City Hall, became the Hudson River Museum in 1948. As well as holding an excellent collection of art (including an extensive collection of works from the Hudson River school), the museum also features exhibits on the history, science and heritage of the region. The museum was founded in 1919 as the Yonkers Museum and contained a number of mineral specimens housed in Yonkers City Hall and was known also as the Yonkers Museum of Science and the Arts, prior to being named the Hudson River Museum. The museum used its namesake, the Hudson River, as the core of its 75th anniversary celebration in 1994. Also central to its history is the Glenview Mansion, a National Register site built in 1877, and the home of the museum for 45 years from 1929 now forms a large part of the Hudson River Museum. It contains six period rooms displaying furniture and decor from that era. The museum is the home of the Andrus Planetarium, the only public planetarium in Westchester County.

The museum first added a planetarium in 1969 to celebrate the beginning of the Space Age and the increasing interest in space and that was just one part of the museum's expansion throughout the 1960s which included the construction of expanded and more modern facilities to house its collections. The planetarium and its laser shows are credited with driving the museum's 30% increase in attendance in the early 1990s due to the appeal of the shows to all ages. The museum's diversity is part of what led to its citation as one of the most unusual cultural facilities by the New York State Council on the Arts in 1972. It has sought to maintain this diversity and relevance amidst changes in leadership and focus throughout its history. The diversity is also apparent in the museum's 23-acre (93,000 m2) site, on which a 2006 expansion attempted to better join the Glenview Mansion with the modern 1969 additions. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.hrm.org

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