Q: This new body of work, currently on view at Kim Foster Gallery, seems like a departure from your previous projects. For example, the built environment—formerly the armature for your photographic explorations of the landscape we view and inhabit—has been left behind. What was your motivation for turning towards Nature alone for this series?

A: this: seasons is fueled by, and reflects on, our distance from our environment peril in the Anthropocene. The dominance and acceleration of technology have deeply affected our relationship to time and space and have corroded our ability to be truly present. In this climate, my photography aims for a deceleration of time—an immersion in space and the present. Through manipulations of light and space in the images, I seek to slow down the moment of observing to see deeply into the experience and meaning of nature and contemplate where we are.

Rather than a departure, nature has been a through-line in much of my work including The Name of (1989-93), a series made in botanical gardens of flowers and their nameplates, and Arachnoid (2002), a series of spiders in their webs. Nature is also fundamental in my work made along the Hudson (1997-2014) – from urban New York City through the suburban to the rural Catskills landscape.

Q: You have said, of the technical aspects of your camera work, that manipulating the focal plane is a way of simulating contemporary perception, previously stated, “I replicate the way the eye darts from place to place across a landscape, focusing on certain details while ignoring others.” In a sense you have been replicating, in a deliberate way, the formerly unwanted effects of a defective lens that could not capture images in sharp focus. Here it seems that the concept of razor focus as a feature of camera work has been almost banished. Could you describe the changes in your view of landscape as nature and how you came to this seemingly a-historical approach?

A: I’ve developed the methodology of combining focused and defocused depictions in an image since the 1980s and have evolved this method and its associations ever since. In this: seasons, I have intensified the method while working on-site with my camera and the unique focal properties of its lenses to map the immediacy of sensory awareness and impermanence. Focal manipulations—from sharp depiction to defocused abstracted elements—indicate shifting and elusive perceptual awareness, experienced amidst light, air, water, rocks and trees. Even small areas of sharp focus in an image—which are very visible in the large-scale prints—are in an essential relationship to the abstraction. The focus of selective attention with its defocused peripheral vision, memory, the blurring of boundaries and the movement of the body through space all coalesce for a fleeting moment via the lens before everything changes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of Cezanne that he depicted “an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.”  His words articulate my desire to capture the immersive act of beholding.

Right: © Susan Wides, September 3, 2016

Q: According the press release, the work in this series emerges from your exploration of a single location—Kaaterskill Clove and its adjacent Platteclove, the locus of inspiration for the Hudson River School painters. When and how did you realize that this place could be the source of a fully realized series of images?

A: I’m inspired by the natural, historic and cultural influences vibrating in a setting and how we gather up these bits of data to form a vision or an idea of nature and landscape in our historical moment. This place has fascinated me since I moved to the area in 2002. I have made two series of contemporary photographs in the same vicinity in dialogue with the Hudson River School artists. Luminous color, light, geology—a persistent sense of place—animate both their paintings and my photographs. However, the work of the Hudson River School artists depicted a grand, majestic Nature and 19^th-century ideas of imperialist expansion. Today, after the end of Empire, nature is degraded and in urgent need of preservation and renewal. this: seasons pushes us not to merely exist in our environment, but to directly engage with phenomena.  

Q: From info in your website, it looks as though the kernel of your ideas for this series originated around 2004-2005. Can you talk a bit about what it took for you to abandon the descriptive possibilities of photography in favor of a nearly complete abstraction of your surroundings for these images?

A: The abstractions of Kaaterskill Creek [January 4, 2005] and Bastion Falls [October 23, 2004] and those of my Arachnoid series (2002) were precursors and inspirations for this: seasons (2014–present.) I was thinking a lot about abstraction in painting and in photography. Abstract elements evolved out of the acts of perceiving and photographing. In my work, abstraction depicts fluid, continually shifting, elusive perceptual states—moment by moment—like vision’s focus on the world. We feel color in our surroundings as sensory awareness in our bodies first—abstract form and color are ideal to picture this kind of perception.

My thinking about abstraction has been inspired by reading the neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s research on how our minds work and on abstraction and art. By isolating elements of line, light, color and form, abstraction emphasizes that what we see as the seemingly inseparable information we take in is actually separated in the brain and then integrated into a vision. Neuroscience says the brain creates the world and abstracting images to their line, color and form affects emotion, imagination and the spirit. Focused and defocussed layering in the images ask you to see vision as inventive as each instant connects us with our surroundings. The complex spaces of the large-scale prints aim to slow down your observation in a meditative looking.

Q: This might seem a mundane thought, but: you must be an avid hiker in order to find locations for your work. Is there something about [I assume] solo walks in the woods that fuels your creative process?

A: Drawing on an alliance with nature, I am seeking a renewal of vision, an experiential encounter between the self and nature out in the world, rather than an encounter mediated by technological devices. Solo, mindful walking, embodied experience, an immersion of the senses, “forest bathing” generate fresh perceptions that I seek to evoke.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: this: seasons has opened up new areas for exploration so I’m continuing to expand on this body of work—I’m looking forward to photographing this winter in the woods, hoping for some good snowfalls. I divide my time between Catskill, New York and New York City and much of my work evolves from my perceptions of my immediate environment. I’m in the beginning stages of experimentation for a whole new body of work in the city.

Susan Wides | this: Seasons continues through December 22 at Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, NY, NY Info Photos courtesy of Kim Foster Gallery

Susan Wides' work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and Europe. The artist's solo exhibitions include a recent mid-career survey at The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; The Center for Creative Photography, AZ; The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz; and Urbi et Orbi Galerie, Paris. Group exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The High Museum of Art, and The Municipal Art Society, New York. Work by the artist is held in many public collections, including The International Center of Photography, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Art Museum of Princeton University, NJ; La Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, FR; The Center for Creative Photography, AZ; The Norton Museum of Art, FL; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Museum, NY and the Museum of The City of New York. Her work appears in numerous anthologies including 'New York in Color' and 'A Photographer's City.' Wides' work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Le Monde, Harper's and New York, among others. Her exhibition catalogs, including Hudson Valley, a 100-page book published by The Hudson River Museum, I, Manahatta, Fresh Kills and The Name of And, are available through Kim Foster Gallery, who has represented the artist for over a decade. Wides is also the Director and Curator of 'T' Space, a non-profit exhibition space dedicated to the cross-inspiration of art, architecture, poetry and music in the natural landscape of the Hudson Valley. Info CV19.FEAT