TODD HIDO
Silver Meadows itself is a real place—a modest Midwestern suburban development that grew and pushed into former farmland on the outskirts of Kent. The setting of Hido’s childhood, it also became the creative wellspring for his work. Compelled to contend with his personal history, Hido wanders deliberately yet randomly in search of imagery that connects with his recollections. In Excerpts from Silver Meadows, this memory-driven approach turns his personal history into an ethereal realm populated by the exquisite and the insidious. Collectively, these photographs present the artist’s metaphorical reckoning with his own past, while providing a majestic summation of the suburban childhood experience in general, where community can be constructed from whole cloth, and homes built similarly to convey stability actually conceal lives seething with sexual and psychological instability. From homes like these, generations of American teenagers have sought escape through the emancipating pleasures promised by sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. (Stephen Wirtz Gallery)