Todd Hido at Stephen Wirtz Gallery

Bay area artist Todd Hido, whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the past, has a new exhibition at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco.

Hido is known for his eerie photographs of houses and suburban streets of Ohio, his home state, and other places.  

Todd Hido
Untitled #10106
2011
chromogenic print
20 x 24 inches, ed. 10
30 x 38 inches, ed. 5
38 x 48 inches, ed 3

In Excerpts from Silver Meadows, his new series, Hido examines the lonely streets and landscapes of Silver Meadows, a housing development outside of Kent, OH.

The press release notes, "Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative, atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated places in America provide the setting, and portraits of female subjects, broken starlets in suburban dress, stand in as the main characters. While the subject matter is mined from Hido’s own experience growing up in Kent, Ohio, what results is a collectively familiar, yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama untethered from a specific time and place, a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology."

I find the unpeopled images of the streets and the lonely houses more compelling than the images of the women.  The suburban-scapes and landscapes provide a richer, more provocative and haunting narrative for me, maybe because, as a Midwesterner, I recognize these places.  But I love his work.  If you're in the Bay area, the exhibition is at the gallery through February 25.