TIM HYDE
March 20 – June 21, 2009
Galleries 178 and 179 (Film and Video Gallery)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street,
Philadelphia
The work of Brooklyn-based artist Tim Hyde will be the subject of the most recent exhibition in the Live Cinema series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition will include three works by the 40-year-old artist who uses video and collaged photography to explore the ways in which space is perceived and seemingly transformed in time. Hyde’s art often amplifies experience of a particular place in relation to specific psychological and historical contexts. In recent years Hyde has made work in locations such as Albania, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States.
Among the works featured is The Keeper (2006), a six-minute single-channel video that records the artist’s interaction with an anonymous person in the courtyard of a former KGB building in Kiev, Ukraine. The video is a single shot of a woman who approached and stood directly in front of Hyde’s camera while he was filming, intentionally blocking his view of the building. Hyde has described the work as an “inverted portrait in which the traditional function of figure and background are reversed.”
Also in the presentation is Video panorama of New York during which the camera fails to distinguish the city from a snowstorm (2007). It’s a continuously looping seven-channel video filmed from the top floor of a Brooklyn building. Quoting earlier traditions of romantic landscape painting, Hyde portrays a vast city becoming gradually invisible in the snow. His camera took a 180-degree sweep over seven hours and Hyde separated the footage into seven parts, each recording one hour of filming. The resulting panorama is at once mesmerizing and disorienting.
A new group of photographic collages will also be presented. Untitled (Monument) (2008-09) addresses and challenges the tradition of the monumental explored in art and architecture while extending the boundaries of photography as a medium. The images are based on sequential photographs of a man holding a piece of construction material with which he maps out shapes in the air. Pulled out of order and cut into fragments, the collages generate a vision of architecture that references the passing of time by juxtaposing multiple moments into one image.
“Tim Hyde’s attentiveness to the production of images in film and photography is evident in his work, and the ways in which it challenges interpretation and the nature of representation,” Assistant Curator Adelina Vlas said. “His thoughtful use of the camera lens engages both the perception and the imagination of the viewer.”
About the artist
Tim Hyde received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2005 and a BA in History from Vassar College in 1992. Since 2005, he has been represented in numerous group exhibitions, among them Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art at the Rose Art Museum; A Tale of Two Cities, Busan Biennale; Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie at the Neuberger Museum of Art; Landscape and Affect at the Sculpture Center in Queens, NY; and more recently This is the Future before it Happened at Outpost for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In 2006, he participated in the Lost Highway Expedition, a project initiated by the School of Missing Studies and Centrala Foundation for Future Cities. Hyde’s work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and The Ulrich Museum of Art.
Related event
In Dialogue: Tim Hyde and Adelina Vlas
Friday, March 20, 2009 at 6 p.m.
Seminar Room (ground floor, next to the Museum Café)
Free after Museum admission
Join Tim Hyde in conversation with Adelina Vlas, Assistant Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
About Live Cinema
Live Cinema is the program series in the Film and Video Gallery exploring the vast production of video and film by local, national and international artists. In the last decades an increasing number of contemporary artists have claimed these media as an artistic outlet, often in dialogue with the video and Super 8 practices of the 1960s and the tradition of experimental filmmaking. Live Cinema focuses on various aspects of this form of contemporary art production. Programs are accompanied by public lectures by participating artists and publications.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States, showcasing more than 2,000 years of exceptional human creativity in masterpieces of painting, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts and architectural settings from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The striking neoclassical building stands on a nine-acre site above the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and houses more than 200 galleries. The Museum offers a wide variety of enriching activities, including programs for children and families, lectures, concerts and films.
For additional information, contact the Marketing and Public Relations Department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art at (215) 684-7860. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For general information, call (215) 763-8100, or visit the Museum’s website at www.philamuseum.org.
Contact:
Norman Keyes, Director of Media Relations
Elisabeth Flynn, Senior Press Officer
(215) 684-7364
eflynn@philamuseum.org
