James Hyde

Lives and works in
(b. 1958, Philadelphia) The Brooklyn-based artist James Hyde looks to Robert Smithson’s and Nancy Holt’s concepts of site and non-site, and to the possibilities of framing the natural within the artificial in the context of a gallery space, as a way to deconstruct the cultural associations attached to both nature photography and abstract painting. Passage, a painting on an inkjet print, is an image of the reservoir at Pyramid Lake. Hyde’s opposition of the extreme surface “realism” of digital photography, placed against the colors of his abstract shapes, snaps photography into place, making it a site, a location, naturalizing it as a pictorial fact, while reframing the question of the truthfulness of photography.