Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce A Road Divided, an extraordinary exhibition of recent large-scale landscape photographs by Todd Hido. Following the debut of his portrait series, Hido has focused his attention once again to the American landscape, a subject explored in his widely acclaimed series Roaming. Presented mostly in large scale, these photographs hit a new mark. Looking from the vantage point of his car seat, and shooting outward through ever changing layered mixtures of condensation, grit, and reflecting glare upon the car’s windshield, Hido masterfully transforms the mundane terrain peripherally sandwiching the myriad of roads typically dotting the outskirts of American cities, into inexplicable poignant images, filled with cinematic gravitas and dream-like sublimity, often ‘crossing the double lines’ between painting and photography.
While Hido embraces the aesthetic, it is not without a critical eye. He is drawn to austere scenes that characterize America as an empty place, evidenced by crossroads, dead-end streets, broken trees, and seemingly endless highways. Moody and psychological, like the times we live in, these landscapes are metaphors for personal emotions, evocative of the dark things that keep us up at night.
TODD HIDO (b.1968, Kent, OH) 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. His latest book, Between the Two, focusing on portraits and nudes, was published in 2006. His upcoming monograph A Road Divided will be published in 2010. He is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California.
