1/1 Preview: Todd Hido, Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows

Todd Hido, Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows, 2013.

Todd Hido’s Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013) is a single work comprised of individual pictures, ranging from Hido’s signature suburban street views to sultry portraits and atmospheric landscapes. The prints in Study, which is available as part of Aperture’s 1/1 Auction, were drawn from Hido’s recent book Excerpts From Silver Meadows (2013), a highly personal, extended photo-essay about the artist’s hometown. Now mounted on board, they have been treated like snapshots; held, touched, bent, burned, and looked at. Text enters the array through pictures of signs reading, “WELCOME HOME,” “EXIT,” and “The End.” The loose grid of images, intuitively arranged, sketches scenes lifted from a rural American novel: furrows in a snowy field are set alongside a child’s-eye-view of a woman leaning through a car window; a phone left off its hook on a carpeted living-room floor is coupled with a portrait of a football player from a high-school yearbook; a nude reclining within the bare confines of a motel room is contrasted with an intricate study of a lakeside exterior.

These pairings draw a photographic cartography heading west, specifically midwest—Silver Meadows is in fact the name of a street in Hido’s hometown of Kent, Ohio. As one’s eyes glance over the pictures, making hazy, dreamlike associations, the bits of text affirm both nostalgic yearning as well as bereavement. Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows reveals the concept of home to be a highly personal referent: it eludes definition, dissolving the very moment we come to find and appreciate it, only to be replaced by the new and unfamiliar. Musing photographically on his own origins, Hido alludes to the nostalgia and eroticism inherent in the process of outgrowing and leaving one’s childhood home.

Sarah McNear, Deputy Director of Public Programs and External Affairs
Schuyler Duffy, Education and Public Programs Assistant

—
Todd Hido’s Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows will be available as part of the Aperture 1/1 Benefit & Auction on Monday, October 28. Pre-bidding has started online at Artspace. Find out more about the 1/1 Benefit & Auction and buy tickets here.