'Susan Wides: Voice of Silence' at Private Public Gallery / 'Layo Bright: Dawn and Dusk'; and 'Elizabeth Englander: Eminem Buddhism, Volume 3,' at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
Susan Wides: Voice of Silence at Private Public Gallery, Hudson, N.Y., through November 10.
Susan Wides, Voice of Silence 0305 (2024) photograph; Courtesy Private Public Gallery.
In this luminous exhibition, photo artist Susan Wides offers a meditation on nature, with colorful, ethereal, abstracted images of streams, waterfalls, and other waterways, around her home near Catskill, New York. The show’s title Voice of Silence suggests a personal and hushed veneration of the natural environment; it also alludes to Silent Spring, the landmark 1962 environmental science book by Rachel Carson that spearheaded many subsequent conservation efforts. In her hyper-estheticized view of nature, Wides offers a gentle but urgent plea for close observation of natural surroundings and for the preservation efforts specific to the mid-Hudson Valley. On view are seventeen large and medium-sized photos, up to 45 by 30 inches, produced over the past four years. Wides is known for her photo works made with a 4 by 5 View camera, in which spatial relationships are enhanced or distorted by subtly manipulating the lens. The recent photos were created with a standard digital camera with which she achieves similarly dramatic effects using a single exposure and no further computer manipulation.
Susan Wides, Voice of Silence 9896 (2023), photograph; Courtesy Private Public Gallery.
Some of the photos appear completely abstract, and all of them have a painterly feel. Voice of Silence 9896 (2023), for instance, shows the close-up view of a splash of water, whose crystalline droplets shimmer against a blazing backdrop of red, orange, and chartreuse, presumably that of autumnal foliage. The work has the gestural aplomb of an Abstract Expressionist composition as well as the immersive feel of a Color Field painting. One of the rare horizontal works, Voice of Silence 0305 (2024), has the panoramic look of a landscape by a Hudson River School painter such as Thomas Cole, who has been an inspiration for Wides. In this photo, a silvery splash of water traverses a vibrant green and white background evocative of a verdant meadow in spring. In this piece, and throughout the show, Wides offers the viewer an immersive experience of color and light. In a darkened rear gallery, the Wides debuts Voice of Silence, a mesmerizing video with gradually dissolving images that closely correspond to the photos. Shown on a single monitor, the works is a study for a planned multichannel video projection in which the viewer would indeed be completely immersed in the light and colors of nature. —David Ebony
Layo Bright: Dawn and Dusk; and Elizabeth Englander: Eminem Buddhism, Volume 3, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, through October 27, 2024.
Layo Bright, Bloom in hues of Blue, Green, Brown, 2024; photo Courtesy The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
As it prepares to open its newly expanded and renovated campus and sculpture garden this November, The Aldrich is currently presenting two exhibitions by artists making impressive solo museum debuts. Layo Bright works in series using mostly cast glass, with elaborate installations and individual pieces, including a fountain made of black glass. One group of works in Dawn and Dusk features colorful, densely encrusted relief sculptures with a single mask or a face embedded in tightly packed arrangements of roses and other flowers. A work such as Bloom in hues of Blue, Green, and Brown (2024) is a technical tour de force with clusters of flowers and two small white doves protruding about six inches from a diamond-shaped panel. Central to the composition is the lower half of a face, covered in gold leaf, whose form recalls Ife bronze heads by the Yoruba people of West Africa.
Formally, works by the Lagos-born, Brooklyn-based artist correspond in some way to the thickly encrusted ceramic relief compositions by Turkish artist Melis Buyruk, and thematically, to the recent cast-glass figures by Panamanian artist Isabel De Obaldia featured in this year’s Venice Biennale. Bright often references her Nigerian heritage in the work, including in a series of stunning abstract compositions of striped cloth covered in clear glass. Here, Bright has embedded in the glass, pieces of “Ghana Must Go” bags—checkered polyethylene tote bags used by many of the West Africans (mostly Ghanaians) who were expelled from Nigeria in 1983. The migration theme alluded to in works such as Ray [Glimmer of Hope], 2024, hints at a political undercurrent running throughout Bright’s visually seductive offerings.
Elizabeth Englander, Yogini no. 07, 2022; photo D. Ebony.
Elizabeth Englander: Eminem Buddhism, Volume 3, is part of a series of presentations that explore Zen meditation. Here, a group of twenty-eight freestanding sculptures evoke various tantric mediation positions. This show centers on compositions that the Boston-born, New York artist refers to as “yoginis.” Made of found and purchased everyday items like children’s toys and furniture, plus a wide array of wooden tchotchkes, Englander creates airy sculptural forms—sometimes redolent of Calder’s “Circus” figures—as odes to the gods, goddesses, and saints of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. A particularly striking example, Yogini no. 07 (2022), features a highly stylized stick figure made of found and painted wood, and bits of fake fur. The open-form personage appears to be seated in a lotus position on a wooden stool. The show’s title comes from fictional short stories Englander’s brother wrote in which he becomes a kind of spiritual mentor to the rapper Eminem, leading to his conversion to Buddhism. In this exhibition, the artist unites the secular and the sacred in a uniquely humorous way, but without losing a sense of reflective reverence befitting the act of meditation. —David Ebony.