In 1976 John Szarkowski, the late photographer and curator, wrote, “The world now contains more photographs than bricks.” To imagine cities built from photographs is to assume that a photograph is not only an image but an object, a material as dense as a brick with information and possibility. Photographs could perform in a frame as mirrors or windows, but they were always made of paper (or metal, in some cases). Pictures today live and die without ever materializing, without ever having a body to hold or touch outside the frame of a computer screen. As the photographic artifacts made over the last century and a half continue to fade, the patina of digital imaging is becoming more and more transparent, and the darkroom, already on the road to obsolescence, will be left to fetishists and purists. These technological ruins will soon become mausoleums, like a room filled with typewriters or the basement where my father stores his LP collection.
James Hyde, a highly consequential mid-career artist who for the last twenty years has probed the possibilities of painting, recently opened a new show of paintings on photographs at Southfirst Gallery. In this show he takes on the role of a DJ, digging through his crates of twelve-inch records and scratching and agitating their surfaces to make synergetic new sounds; the title of the exhibition is “Unbuilt,” but it could just as easily have been “Remix” or even “Reflex.”
Painted in the language of abstraction, but never conforming to stylistic conventions, Hyde’s colored papier-mache rectangles and broad swaths of paint alternately cover, dissolve into and call attention to sections of the photograph beneath. This exhibition of painting on photographs brings the object sharply into focus–Hyde knows well that putting paint on the surface of a photograph not only erases the veracity of the image, but magnifies the interplay between image and surface, and by obstructing our view of the photograph and complicating our view of the painting, he allows us to see both more clearly, with the style, energy and inventiveness that we have come to expect from him. The photographs, which support these paintings, depict both the natural world and the urban built environment; several pictures show buildings in various stages of completion, all without a skin, giving us a view into the structure.
Hyde, who in a former life earned his income as a contractor, clearly understands the language of construction. The mechanics of building after all is not so different from the mechanics of seeing, and in this exhibition Hyde-as-architect has given us a new city, one built from, and on top of, photographs; a city that honors the brick and allows us to see not only the method of construction but the substance of it.
James Hyde: Unbuilt | Southfirst | 60 N. 6th Street | Brooklyn NY 11211 | March 6 – April 19, 2009
Image: Recline, 2009. Courtesy Southfirst.
