Meulensteen

TIM HYDE JANUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2007 The gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition of New York-based artist Tim Hyde. The exhibition features video and photographic works that amplify singular experiences of place fused to specific psychological, historical, and technological contexts. The works were shot over the last two years in Belarus, Ukraine, California, and New York City. Invisible City (2005), 5 minutes, single channel projection Invisible City echoes the Italo Calvino novel in which Marco Polo recounts his travels to the reclusive emperor Kublai Khan. Marco Polo reenacts the places he has seen through "gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and horror, animal barking or hootings..." Hyde filmed Invisible City the first night he arrived in Belarus, recording an uncanny sequence of encounters in a city that does not feel wholly real. Like Marco Polo's performance, the work reconstructs an experience of strangeness, of being a stranger. The Keeper (2006), single channel video, 6 minutes The Keeper records a silent and delicate negotiation between the artist and an anonymous elderly woman 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. The woman stood framed by the monolithic architecture of the former Soviet structure, now a fast food restaurant. The work can be seen as an inverted portrait — the woman's intention was not to be photographed, but to prevent a photograph from occurring. Video panorama of New York City in March 2006 during which the camera failed to distinguish the city from a snowstorm (2006 – 2007), continuous randomized loop, seven channel video Video panorama... was filmed with one camera from the top floor of a Brooklyn apartment building throughout a seven hour snowstorm. Each monitor of the seven screen panorama represents one hour of the storm. Hyde utilized only the periods in which the storm became so dense that it seemed to merge with the surrounding buildings. The camera's auto-focus racked back and forth, causing the images to pulse rhythmically. The work echoes J.M.W. Turner's painting Snowstorm (1842) and reinterprets the visual language of the sublime in the context of the camera’s failed attempts to decipher the disappearing city. Tim Hyde received an MFA in visual arts at Columbia University in 2005. His work has been included in Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art, curated by Michael Rush, and the 2006 Busan Biennale and he participated in the Lost Highway Expedition, organized by Marjetica Potrc and Kyong Park in 2006. His work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Ulrich Museum of Art, and the Margulies Collection.

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