Exhibition writing for Private Public Gallery (Hudson, NY)
September 28–November 10, 2024
Before he turned to the camera, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a prolific poet. He maintained his writing practice his entire life. In 1975, the same year as his untimely assassination, Pasolini published the short essay “Disappearance of the Fireflies”:
“In the early sixties, because of air pollution, and specially water pollution in the countryside (our blue rivers and limpid irrigation ditches), fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was swift and dazzling. After a few years the fireflies were no longer there. They are now a heartbreaking memory of the past: and an elderly man with yet such a memory can no longer see himself in the face of today's youngsters as he once was, and hence he can no longer hold to those beautiful feelings of before.”
Here, Pasolini laments the extinguishing of the firefly as a consequence of ecological destruction as well as the loss of a particular collective experience of communing with nature. Future generations will not have those wondrous twinkling encounters, nor will they have the memories to share with others. In Pasolini’s telling, he cautions against the danger that we only register the absence of the fireflies when it is too late. He implores us to observe, to notice.
The work of Susan Wides is an invitation to, and a product of, close observation. These images require the artist’s deep immersion in nature, seeking the synergy between water, light, trees, and rocks. Wides engages her immediate surroundings in the woodlands of Catskill, New York. Through her daily practice of walking, she has come to know the landscape intimately, attuned to its shifts and seasonality, to the protean patterns of light changing throughout the day. Wides’ work is the result of being in nature, of total presence. There is a directness and proximity expressed in the forms and forces the artist composes.
Wides’ process unfolds through these rhythms of time, light, and space in a technique that negotiates the artist’s deft manipulation of the camera lens’ focal properties in single exposures with improvisation and experimentation. These images also express a quiet patience, as if the artist waits then welcomes, with gratitude, that special light and color of a sublime combination of molecules never to be repeated the same way again. This silent magic relies on a medium to constitute its form and expression. Transcending and exceeding words, Wides’ images are the medium through which the silent forces of nature may be given voice.
And yet despite the technical rigor, her images expand beyond the conventional concerns of photography. Wides instead pushes the qualities of the lens into orbit with painting and music. These works resonate as gestural, as abstraction, as evocative and emotive. They enable perhaps one of the most profound experiences: that is, to see something new, something never seen before. Such perception stretches our minds to accommodate a whole new set of forms, which begs long, slow looking characterized by the pleasures of defamiliarization and mystery.
In our current moment of relentless digital feeds, images that once shocked and provoked action—extreme weather events, displaced climate refugees, animal habitats disrupted, untold acres of forests leveled—now circulate so ubiquitously that they lose their bite. Alarming documentation of the world in crisis, routed through mediums whose viewership is predisposed to seek small hits off the next reel and the next and the next, is a crisis unto itself. It’s not just the issue of attention or the problem of digital versus physical. It’s also the miraculous faculty of observation itself at stake.
Almost as an antithesis to the kind of looking social media demands, Wides’ work offers a poetic and subtle meditation on the urgency of ecological preservation. For the artist, the regenerative potential of the natural environment, our inseparable relationship with it, and the necessity for repair in a period of profound loss on the planet fuel the work. Before her images, we are called upon to look in a different way—to pause, to notice the quiet transformations happening around us: changing patterns of the stream splashing against the river rocks, shifting hues of the forest in the midday sunlight. These images appeal to a level of attunement necessary to detect the slightest of warnings emitted by the earth, to hear its voice of silence. It is expressed when a certain shade of brilliant orange arrives too early in autumn, when the light saturates the tree canopy with a different density, when there are fewer fireflies than last summer. The visions Wides’ creates rouse viewers to regard our earth with care and attention and to be sensitive to its acute indices of change. At the same time, the work moves us to be with nature, allows our eyes to open, to let the unfocused periphery flood our vision in full phenomenon.
Image: Susan Wides, 9961, 2023. UV print on dibond.