Hudson: Mannahatta to Kaaterskill is a mid-career survey of Susan Wides’ investigation of New York City and its surrounding landscape in 50 large-scale photographs. This exhibition represents Wides’ fourteen-year study of the perception of place using sites from the urban-rural spectrum along the Hudson River. Wides’ exploration begins at the historical ‘source’, the Catskill /Hudson Valley region of the Hudson River School, and continues in suburban Westchester, and on to the city. With her camera, Wides creates a transformative vision expressing her intuitive and conceptual response to the landscape, cityscape, and social environment.

The large size of the photographs invites the viewer’s inspection, isolating moments from the tangled weave. They reveal the process of seeing: the eye cannot capture every moment, so memory must fill in the rest. We live in the global city, bombarded by a sea of images. In order to truly connect with a place, we must still walk outside, breathe its air, soak up its light, its spaces and its history.

The photographs in Hudson Valley, Mannahatta to Kaaterskill embody both a conscious and an unconscious act. Wides invites the viewer to join in this encounter in which perception suddenly changes and the recognizable is reimagined.