James Hyde WEST at FREIGHT+VOLUME

James Kalm pedals into the Lower East Side for a brunch-time interview and walk-through tour of James Hyde’s latest show “West”. Hyde has been questioning the relationship between photography and contemporary abstract painting for decades now, and this latest effort posits questions both aesthetic and psychological that are at the forefront of the practice today. Having traveled out West and recorded large collections of landscape photos, Hyde then manipulates the images, combines files and adds sections of “home brewed” acrylic to create objects that ride the uncomfortable boundary between a “painting” a “picture”, and a “photograph”. Though not seeing himself as a member of the “Pictures Generation” the artist nonetheless does contribute to the ontological questioning of how contemporary people experience the world, and decode the images and visual syntax they are submerged in. This program was recorded May 11, 2018, on the Lower East Side.