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Stephen Wirtz Gallery : A Road Divided by Todd Hido

The Stephen Wirtz Gallery presents *A Road Divided", new landscape photographs by Todd Hido, from October 22 until December 20, 2008. Following his 2006 debut of previously unseen portraits, Hido has returned his focus to the American landscape, a subject explored in his widely acclaimed 2004 series Roaming. Presented mostly in large scale, these photographs cover new ground, clocking up references to paintings as a means of aesthetic expression en route.

Driving along lonely roads on the outskirts of American cities, Hido creates poignant images filled with inexplicable gravity, cinematic scenes of places that somehow reside in our collective memory, in a paradoxical realm where sense of place and a sense of displacement co-exist. Indeed these boundaries seem as blurred as the veils of rain or ice that cover the car’s windshield, which he often treats as an additional lens. In turn, this method of framing his compositions brings the immediacy of a fleeting moment to the stationary scenes he leaves tailing behind in the rear mirror. Chance patterns of sprinkling raindrops on the windshield and sunlight breaking the shrouded sky combine to luminous yet unsettling effect.

While Hido embraces the aesthetic, he does so with a critical eye. His vision is one of severity, of America as an empty place, evidenced by crossroads, dead-end streets, broken trees, and never ending highways. After all, in an abandoned landscape, a turn-off may perhaps first carry hope, but can just as well lead to nowhere.

TODD HIDO
A Road Divided
October 22 - December 20, 2008
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, Inc.
49 Geary Street, 3rd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108
www.wirtzgallery.com