JAMES HYDE – GROUND
2015-11-30An influential and respected figure, Hyde uses the flat field of painting as a topological arena that ties together the physical substance of painting and the ground on which it is laid, extracting spatial dimensions and new meanings from this relationship. In these increasingly direct works, he utilizes abstraction to break photography’s semantic hold on the way we construct an image of the world.1
Hyde looks to the ideas of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson and their concept of the site and non-site. By framing the natural landscape within the artificial, associations attached to both nature photography and abstract painting are unpacked and deconstructed. As discussed with Lucía Sanromán, “By framing the photograph within the ‘objectness’ of painting…a type of painterly suspicion is created in the photograph”.
Beginning in 2009 Hyde took to the hills of California to photograph the vistas and great panoramas off Interstate 5. Coming from New York, Hyde was struck by the openness and vast perspectives of the California landscape. Two years later he revisited the sites he first photographed, including Pyramid Lake and the oak trees depicted in the series.
The title “Ground” resonates with the descriptive photography of western landscapes. In the painting context, the ground is the active place on which painting occurs. Hyde uses a home brewed paint for these works, consisting of pigment dispersed in acrylic mediums, and in most cases that pigment is a form of ground earth. In turn, Hyde’s photographs follow a “light-room” process developed in the computer, distorting and adjusting it and challenging the notion of any factual naturalism.
Exhibition runs through to December 19th, 2015
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2635 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles
90034
California
