Image:Susan Wides, February, 22, 2010. Pigmented Ink Print, 52 x 35 in. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.
Art & Entertainment, Susan Wides’ sixth solo show at the gallery. With this new work, Wides builds upon over ten years of exploring New York City and its environs through the facets of shift/tilt techniques. Whether it is the curving opulence of the Metropolitan Opera, or the dizzying colors at Times Square’s Toys R’ Us, Wides’ lens gives us a swooping tour of New York’s spaces for the public and privileged in works that are both recognizable and disorienting.
In this new body of large-scale pigmented ink prints created in the first few months of 2010, Wides continues to explore the way physical phenomena are experienced by the senses and imagination through intuitive insight, states of awareness and visual thinking – manifestations that exist only in fleeting perception and which only her camera is capable of reproducing.
Her photographs portray a cradled interiority of New York City: figure and ground are joined together through blur and tilt. The viewer is often unsure of where they are standing in relation to the picture plane, perspective is no longer conceived through conventional vanishing points, but through shifting glints of interactive moments.
In her 2007 show Mannahatta, Wides photographed the ever-shifting cultural and social landscape of the city with rare permission atop the new structures of its recent building boom. Art & Entertainment steps down from the post-financial crash’s now half-empty skyscrapers, and into the spaces created by, and inside the institutions that make up the city itself. With her recent switch from a traditional 4×5 view camera to an easily portable digital camera, Wides gains a new spontaneity and access to the city’s rooms and corridors.
Wides’ work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and Europe. Her solo exhibitions include The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz and Urbi et Orbi Galerie, Paris. Group exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The High Museum, Atlanta; and The Municipal Art Society, New York. Work by the artist is held in many public collections, including The International Center of Photography, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Art Museum of Princeton University; La Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The Norton Museum of Art, FL and the Museum of The City of New York. Her work has recently appeared in the anthologies Here is New York and One Man’s Eye: The Alan Siegel Collection. She regularly contributes to magazines, such as Harpers and New York.
Wides’ work will be included in two publications coming out next year. Her photographs will appear in the Rizzoli publication Horizontal New York, by Marla Hamburg Kennedy, and an Abrams publication edited by Robert Shamis that will be a historical survey of color photography of New York City. Wides will have a solo exhibition at the Hudson River Museum from June to September, 2011.
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